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October 31, 2025
Iowa's mothballed nuclear power plant is coming back online under an agreement between NextEra Energy (current majority owner of the plant) and Google. It's an ambitious deal, under which Google is getting a 25-year deal to buy the electricity. It gives some scale of Google's current outlook to see that they're willing to agree now to start geting power no sooner than three years from now. It's no small matter to make a deal that won't even begin to produce outputs until the next President is in office. ■ It's something else still to consider that the arrangement lasts for 25 years into the future. On one hand, it's refreshing to imagine that Google is strategically planning a quarter-century or more in advance. ■ On the other hand, it's amusing to imagine that Google executives are willing to make plans that far into the future. Google's first and most modest public product (its search engine) is barely 25 years old itself. ■ It's quite a lot to say that a company is willing to do something with such a long time horizon -- especially when it's obviously being done to fill a spike in energy demand tied to a computing trend that has only had a short-term time in the spotlight. It might be wondered: How often is a similar time horizon used in families? Is the 30-year mortgage the only time anyone agrees to stick with an investment for a quarter of a century or more?
October 30, 2025
In a bid to improve its position to generate cash from advertising, Google has announced "new tools designed to make any YouTube content a premier experience on TV". That's an energetic way of saying that they will artificially increase the resolution on videos that were uploaded at any resolution less than 1080p HD. ■ In theory, it could be harmless -- though the reliance upon artificial intelligence to deliberately alter old content is a bit unnerving. And, to its credit, Google says it will ensure that a "clear option to opt-out" remains for content creators, and that viewers can disable the feature within a few clicks. ■ But there are still problems. One is that Google is notorious for policy changes on short notice, and with little or no reason. The "Google Graveyard" is full and growing even more crowded by the day. Who is to say they won't change policy again in a few years? Authorship ought to mean something, even if it means that something in standard definition. ■ The other matter is that it reflects a willingness to play fast and loose with the truth. Turnerization drew no small number of critics, and for good reason -- "Casablanca" is perfect in its original black and white. Most YouTube videos are far from historically notable, but taking liberties with basic knowledge is a hazardous undertaking. Restorations gone awry offer a fairly cautionary tale about what can happen when someone other than the author decides to "touch up".
Sue Danielson worked for decades as the core member of the WHO Radio news department. She's a first-class reporter and a great person.
October 29, 2025
The nerds will have to save us
Anyone looking for a most incredible Internet rabbit hole ought to visit the Facebook page titled, "SS United States: An Operational Guide to America's Flagship". It's an endlessly detailed discussion page full of photographs, content, and even debate about the SS United States, which at one time was the fastest passenger ship in the world. ■ The curators of the page and its followers (numbered in the thousands) don't hesitate to discuss the ship's history in long, detailed threads. The Facebook page is an adjunct to a 216-page book on the ship, but it acts much more like a forum than a pure marketing tool. The people populating it are nerds -- a term of endearment for those who take an enhanced level of interest in subject-matter knowledge for recreational reasons. Every civilization has nerds and every civilization needs them, desperately, even in the best of times. ■ A serious social worry we should reasonably have right now is that the proliferation of junk books, articles, and online content written by unaccountable and unreliable artificial intelligence programs are going to fundamentally and irreversibly pollute the world's reliable base of historical knowledge. Writing a well-documented, carefully-researched history of a subject like the SS United States is time-consuming and costly (if in no other terms but the opportunity cost of doing something else). ■ It would be cheap and easy to artificially generate a completely fabricated history of the same subject -- complete with convincing photograph-like images -- and sell it as a competitor to the authentic, human-written original. Once a market for a real thing is revealed, the market for imposters, copycats, reverse-engineered imitations, and opportunistic rip-offs is rarely far behind. And the cheaper the knock-off, the greater the potential for profit-making. The world of books is already plagued by them, and large language models are making the problem exponentially worse. ■ That's a completely upside-down incentive structure for society's interests, if reliable knowledge means anything to a civilization at all. It may become much harder to sort good information from bad in the very near future, and it's going to be up to the nerds of the world to save us. It's going to be an extraordinarily heavy lift.
Anthony Bourdain's perfect hamburger
It's an engineering question as much as a flavor one
October 28, 2025
Jaw-dropping footage from the Hurricane Hunters
(Video) The views they're capturing from the eye of Hurricane Melissa are bewildering in their scale
Des Moines introduced an odor-monitoring system to detect odor-producing chemicals, and it's no surprise that complaints have fallen. Measurement creates opportunities for feedback loops.
Doesn't seem like that should be a controversial request, much less require a court order
October 26, 2025
Hurricane Melissa, having already undergone extremely rapid intensification, is rearing up to pummel Jamaica with an unfathomable 20" of rain across nearly the entire island, with some portions of the island potentially in line to get 40" of rain. ■ That's a rate virtually no infrastructure is (or even can be) built to withstand, and Jamaica simply isn't equipped with first-rate infrastructure. It's a country that remains stuck on a low-growth trajectory, and without a sustained period of strong economic growth and subsequent investment (and reinvestment) in the public infrastructure, events like this are going to cause far more death and devastation than they otherwise might. ■ It's important to remain forever skeptical of government power, but never to grow irrevocably cynical about what good government is uniquely equipped to do. The United States is providing Hurricane Hunter surveillance of the storm, something that NOAA is uniquely equipped to do, both in terms of the physical equipment required and the skilled technical teams able and willing to commit the effort. The Hurricane Hunter team is literally one of a kind. ■ And yet those American Hurricane Hunters aren't being paid right now due to the Federal government shutdown. Imagine flying into a hurricane in order to save the lives of others, knowing only that you have a reasonable expectation (but no guarantee) that you'll receive back pay for the job. That's its own kind of failure -- the machinery of government hasn't failed, but the administration of law over that machinery has. Planes are in the air, but paychecks aren't being printed. ■ The idea that government can solve every problem is a mirage. But it's also a mistake to think that it cannot be used, carefully and in limited fashion, to enhance the quality of life -- to promote the general welfare, in the words of the Constitution. Modesty and self-control are needed anytime a government is established among people; cynicism and a burn-it-all-down ethos are not.
October 25, 2025
The US government has been in a battle with the independent agency running the Voice of America, announcing summary layoffs of effectively the whole staff in August, then being told in September that it cannot just fire everyone. The campaign to Save VOA argues that without the broadcaster's efforts to report the news fairly and independently, people living in countries without freedom of the press are being deprived and cut off. ■ International broadcasting has always been a tool of public diplomacy, which is merely another way of saying that countries try to achieve some objectives by persuading people living in other countries. The VOA charter openly says, "VOA will represent America, not any single segment of American society, and will therefore present a balanced and comprehensive projection of significant American thought and institutions." ■ The Canadian province of Ontario just engaged in some public diplomacy of its own, with a television ad using Ronald Reagan's words to attack tariffs and trade barriers. The words came straight from a routine weekly radio address by Reagan in 1987, making the ad wildly compelling. ■ Americans should be alert to the fact that, whether or not our government participates in the world marketplace of public diplomacy, we're still in it. Others will try to influence us, even if we have unilaterally surrendered on trying to influence others. ■ Some, like Russia, will do it through sinister propaganda. Others will engage like Ontario has -- even if the consequences aren't always predictable. But the bottom line is that it's going to happen, and withdrawal from the global information sphere is exceptionally self-defeating.
October 24, 2025
Five dozen countries are expected to sign the U.N. Cybercrime Convention this weekend in, of all places, Vietnam. The UN says it includes "human rights safeguards". The Cybersecurity Tech Accord, whose signatories form a real who's who among tech companies, has protested that the safeguards aren't good enough. Many of those tech companies have undermined their own public goodwill through the reckless embrace of artificial intelligence models that put the public interest far too low on the priority list. ■ But the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which may be characterized as more of an honest broker, wwarned plainly that "By permitting broad international cooperation in surveillance for any crime deemed 'serious' under national laws -- defined as offenses punishable by at least four years of imprisonment -- and without adequate robust safeguards, the draft convention risks being exploited by governments to suppress dissent and target marginalized communities." ■ The situation highlights two important points that exist in an uneasy tension with one another. There is a reasonably clear need for international coordination to check the sinister deployment of digital tools to exploit others. The Internet makes many problems into global problems, and responding appropriately takes constructive cooperation across national borders. ■ But at the same time, the United Nations is profoundly ill-structured to respond to the nuances of managing cybercrime within the context of real security for human rights. If the definition of "crime" is left solely to individual countries, then little protection remains for those individuals who might try to exercise resistance to an oppressive government. If simple dissent can be labeled illegal, then what good is the law except as just another tool of oppression?
October 21, 2025
When actor Suzanne Somers died in October 2023, the artificial-intelligence boom had not really begun in earnest. ChatGPT was still quite new, and Google had not yet released Gemini. But her husband, Alan Hamel, says they had already discussed creating a digital twin for Somers after her Earthly life was over. ■ Hamel seems to want the Somers chatbot to become just as famous as the real person, and possibly even harder-working. "Suzanne AI", as he called it to People Magazine, is supposed to be rolled out soon to her website, where Hamel says fans "can come and just hang out with her". ■ It has been fairly obvious that we were going to land here someday: "Talking" to the dead has been an enduring pastime (see: Ouija boards), and the idea of talking to a computer is at least as old as "Star Trek". There are ways this can be done well, and ways it can be done harmfully. ■ A program could be trained on an individual's written and recorded output and subsequently queried, just like one might enter a question into a search engine. For people with lots of writing or recordings to their credit, the resulting database could be quite useful. ■ If the machine furnishes a response that clearly puts the answer at arm's length, then that's probably a net good. Put another way, if the answer could be voiced by any radio or television news anchor, then it's probably just fine. We could call such a tool a "personality engine", in the sense that it acts like a search engine for an individual's personality. ■ But if a user insists on hearing an answer to their prompt in a synthesized version of a loved one's voice, or yet further in a virtual video form (not unlike Max Headroom), then there are really grave risks of fundamentally confusing the wiring of human memory in ways that can't be repaired. Memory is already fragile at best and easily corrupted at worst, and introducing convincing synthetic remakes of deceased people creates a wildly fraught ethical trap -- especially when AI hallucinations are already a known hazard. ■ Once human memory has been corrupted, there's really no clear way of repairing it. We already live with unreliable eyewitness accounts and the Mandela effect. It can only turn much worse if "Suzanne AI" becomes one of a cast of thousands or even millions, filling our present with synthetic revivals of the past.
October 20, 2025
Orchestrating institutional revival
A perfect storm, resulting from the "silver tsunami" of Baby Boomers withdrawing from work and other active pursuits, the widespread lockdowns and shutdowns of 2020, and the digital world's ever-expanding way of crowding out experiences in the face-to-face world, has assaulted the health of countless social institutions. Religious attendance in many denominations has taken a hit. Civic and service groups are struggling to hold the line. Businesses once owned by proprietors or small groups of partners are being traded around like baseball cards. ■ What may be needed more than ever is a whole movement to train and mobilize people to orchestrate institutional revival. Notwithstanding the fad for putting the title of "founder" on college applications, what we really need are people who can lead processes of renewal and revitalization inside existing worthwhile organizations. ■ That tends to be a less glamorous task than "founding" something new. The tech sector's obsession with "disruption" doesn't help matters, either, particularly when that sector is in the midst of a fairly evident bubble that is crowding out both capital and human investment in other areas. ■ Age is no guarantee of perfection, either for humans or their institutions. But the groups we form do tend to take shape around corrections encountered along the way; just as the Constitution is better now after 27 amendments than it was in 1787, so too do most institutions end up improved by reforms that accrue over time. (Most, not all: There's no redeeming some awful organizations, but they're usually broken from the start.) ■ The decay and collapse of good institutions ought to be a concern of us all. Nobody can be a member of every group, nor should anyone want to be. But the need for people to be able to work together for useful purposes is good for all. As Alexis de Tocqueville put it all the way back in 1835, "There are no countries in which associations are more needed, to prevent the despotism of faction or the arbitrary power of a prince, than those which are democratically constituted." Orchestrating the revivals needed by so many institutions right now will take both talents and skills, but there's precious little time to waste.
October 19, 2025
Yesterday's aircraft of tomorrow, today
Boeing has announced a special program under its Boeing Business Jets division: A "turnkey" service to convert 747s into VIP long-haul private jets. Most of the airlines that used to fly the 747 don't anymore, having modernized to newer aircraft that promise better fuel efficiency per passenger-mile flown. The raw laws of market forces decide much of what flies and what doesn't, no matter how sentimental some slices of the public might be over the waning of the 747. ■ The reason people on the ground care about the plane is the same reason it might just survive an unlikely revival as an oversized business jet: The 747 is big and distinctive. The bulbous upper deck and four engines make it simple enough for even a kindergartener to recognize, so the types of people who have huge budgets and a demand for private travel might well be able to satisfy the act of very conspicuous consumption by getting a 747. ■ The number of individual playboys looking to light their money on fire may be rather small, but there's a fair chance that the offer might entice a few professional sports teams. Others with smaller travel demands are probably more likely to stick with smaller, faster planes closer-suited to their wants. ■ It is, however, a tribute to the value created by good design that Boeing would even bother to market a plane that is nearly 60 years old as a modern business jet. Almost any other 60-year-old design you might encounter for sale anywhere is probably being advertised strictly for its retro characteristics. Having a 747, though, puts the prospective buyer in the same customer class as the President of the United States. Unlikely as it may seem on the merits alone, there may yet be a few private buyers hoping to join that club.
October 18, 2025
A seat at the table for a board member with no body
It's never really clear in the moment at what precise moment a craze has hit its peak, but someone usually says something so spectacularly over-the-top as to offer a pretty good marker. For a gratuitous example: The CEO of Logitech declaring, on stage, that she would welcome an artificial-intelligence bot as a member of her company's board of directors. ■ The problem isn't that a board can't use a reliable source of memory. Boards have secretaries and take minutes. They produce reports and reach decisions. A computer that works like a super-stenographer isn't necessarily a bad idea, assuming that board members actually make use of the institutional memory available to them. ■ Nor is the problem that an AI agent can't be properly trained to align with the people it serves. It can be done, though it requires very deliberate choices about which values and which stakeholders matter -- and in what measure. In theory, an AI agent could help to shed light on blind spots. ■ The really big problem is that it's foolhardy to commit to high-technology solutions when very few corporate boards are any more capable of critical thought or independent analysis than a collection of potted houseplants. Warren Buffett even noted in his most recent letter to shareholders, "I have also been a director of large public companies at which 'mistake' or 'wrong' were forbidden words at board meetings or analyst calls." ■ Decisions must still be made by people, and there is nearly overwhelming risk that technology treated as a cure-all will only serve to make human board members even more docile and compliant than before. Imagine the likelihood that any individual board member will want to speak up and challenge the computer "seated" at the table by the CEO: Who will dare to argue with the mystical oracle machine? ■ It's plain old folly to focus on adding supposedly high-tech tools to human systems without doubling or tripling the effort devoted to improving the skills and qualities of the human beings at the table. That's why the current moment seems a lot like the peak of a fad.
October 17, 2025
Human beings are members of an elite class of animals, known as the persistence predators. We've made our way to the top of the food chain not by having the biggest teeth, the sharpest claws, or the most sensitive noses. We've done it by having the ability to keep going when chasing prey and not giving up. ■ The ability to outlast what we chase is so deeply embedded in our physical nature that it undoubtedly has an effect on our psychological makeup. Our ability to pursue long-term goals is something that is so necessary to our physical survival that it must influence how we think, as well. We can't be the product of nearly two million years of evolution without our brains having adapted -- at least somewhat -- to staying occupied and mission-oriented. ■ It's hard to escape the conclusion, then, that people who lack the ability to persist after a goal have either had it beaten out of them or have chosen to abandon it based on social influences. Those who give up too easily are denying something about their very nature as humans. ■ What causes people to give up prematurely rather than to embrace the long war? There are too many things that need to be done that take persistence, but ultimately end up in enormous reward: It simply doesn't make sense to deny this one thing that nature has given us that we have evolved to be the very best at doing in the whole animal kingdom. ■ Biology makes persistence our superpower: It's what got us to the top of the food chain. And it lodged something special in our brains that we have to be smart enough not to abandon in our social affairs with other humans. Some worthy goals take a long time and volumes of persistence. Giving up isn't in our nature.
October 16, 2025
Ever since the computing world broke free of text-based interfaces like DOS and Telnet, almost every graphical platform has used some kind of icon to signal that a page, program, or multimedia file is loading. Spinning circles and blinking dots serve notice that "Something is coming, and we're working on it, but it's not ready yet". ■ It's hard to imagine just how much better television news programming (especially the cable news networks) would be if TV news also came with a "loading" screen. Something to say, "We're working on it, but there's nothing reliably intelligent for us to say quite yet." ■ CNN ran a segment this week featuring a report on betting markets and their predictions about the outcome of the 2026 Congressional vote. It's hard to think of a better example of nonsense masquerading as news, serving no other purpose but to fill space and proffer the illusion of information. ■ With 8 billion people on the planet, there's enough newsworthy material to go around and fill 24 hours a day with news coverage. But the supply of potential news content isn't distributed evenly with the distribution of journalists. ■ Even more consequentially, much of what is objectively "news" fails an important test for media success: It's not obvious to the target audience what's in it for them. India, for instance, is home to one out of every eight people on the planet, but it's rarely obvious to the news viewer in Boise or Little Rock why that news from way over there is of any consequence to them at home. ■ But it shouldn't be of any less interest than what shows up in online prediction markets about an election more than 12 months away, and that's where the spinning icon that says "Loading..." should come in. There are plenty of times when nothing would be better than something, if that "something" is no more fact-based than an astrology report. News is undoubtedly coming -- it always is -- but when it's not ready yet, we'd be better off knowing that it's OK to look somewhere else for a while.
October 14, 2025
Education is all too often treated as an object -- a thing to be possessed, much like a football on a field. Someone holds on to it and moves it in their preferred direction for a while, then someone else takes it in another direction. The contest over the object sooner or later overwhelms the meaning and purpose of education itself. ■ Great forces, from unions to parent groups and from mega-donors to the Federal government, battle over who may deliver it, set the rules about it, or decide how much it will cost. The debates get pretty fierce. ■ Indigenous Peoples' Day serves up a healthy reminder that the intrinsic value of something like education shouldn't be measured by those battling to control it like some abstract battlefield, but instead by just how hard people will work to get it when they have been denied. ■ The ongoing struggle to correct generational lapses in access to education remains an expensive indignity to overcome. Some 22,000 students are now enrolled in 34 different tribal colleges and universities. That's a lot of individuals, but bachelor's degree attainment among American Indians is still half that of the national average. ■ The first tribal college is only 57 years old, which offers some sense about how relatively young the process of correcting past errors still remains. They aren't the only option, but when it comes to optimizing access and opportunity for people who have been overlooked or left out for generations, colleges close to enrolled tribal members are an important solution. Not everyone needs a degree, of course, but if communities are chronically left out of the degree pipeline, it's bound to be economically costly for them. ■ Seen this way, education doesn't look much like a football to fight over. It looks more like a valuable good that becomes even more valuable the further it is spread, whether through scholarships or other support.
Lee Enterprises is ceasing the Monday print editions of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Omaha World-Herald, the Lincoln Journal Star, and the Quad City Times. Other papers outside the Midwest are also being affected.
Photos from the Des Moines Register archives
Downtown buildings galore, almost all gone today
October 12, 2025
A project by the Pew Research Center found that link rot has killed two of every five pages that were on the Internet in 2013. Whether the pages have been taken down entirely, moved, or simply neglected to death, the point is that they are there no more -- at an appalling rate of disappearance, considering the centrality of the Internet to our daily lives now. ■ The loss of information to the sands of time has been a problem throughout human times. Historians are forever trying to piece together fragments of artifacts in order to reconstruct lost knowledge of the past (consider the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls or the excitement over the "reading" of scrolls once damaged by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius). ■ Some information has always been allowed to fade away; we know what ancient people thought was important because they did things like chiseling it in stone. But we have made the largely unconscious decision to store most of our contemporary information online, often unconsciously assuming that digitality equals permanence, even without any reason to believe that. It wouldn't be so potentially dangerous an assumption if we were still fanatical about creating permanent records. ■ Unfortunately, we are not. A great example: The Statistical Abstract of the United States, which was published from 1878 until 2011 to provide a comprehensive look at Census data. But the publication was terminated, presumably because of the assumption that "all the information is online now". ■ What we've failed to do amid all this flattening of information (and information access) is to distinguish what content really needs to be permanent from that which can be forgotten without regret. There is no special HTML code for "Preserve this content at any cost", even though there is content utterly deserving of such a flag. And now, with artificially-generated content "killing the Web" right before our eyes, the consequences of failing to draw the proper distinctions are arriving even faster than anticipated.
October 11, 2025
There is a familiar old metaphor about the duality of human nature: An angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, each whispering into our ears in a battle to influence our decisions. It's a metaphor so familiar that it even appears in seemingly countless cartoons. ■ To an extent, it's helpful to see a depiction of that duality so that we can appreciate that all of us struggle with a battle between good and evil. But what if there's something missing from that metaphor? What if there's a third character and rather than it being a struggle simply between two, it's a three-body problem instead? ■ What if we were to depict the same angel and devil battling it out, but with a character for self-interest who tips the balance between the two of them? ■ For some people, the angel will overwhelm almost all bad thoughts. For others, the devil. But for most of us, most decisions end up depending upon not just the balance between our good and bad natures, but also where the preponderance of self-interest lies. ■ Society really is about making sure we align self-interest with the interests of the community as a whole, so that the good angel wins more often than not -- and particularly in the times when it counts most. If evil seems to be winning more often than it should, then, of course, we should have concerns about the viability of the devil in too many lives. ■ But we should also have a more immediate concern with where the preponderance of self-interest lies in tipping the balance. That's more controllable among people of goodwill and decency. Structuring self-interest so that it provides a framework of rewards and punishments that serve to tilt the balance in favor of the angels is not only an extremely important job, but also highly dispositive about where we end up in the long run.
October 10, 2025
Heeding Warren Buffett's advice to "Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful", the time seems quite right for an extra-sober assessment of work from a contrarian perspective. So much money is being spent on data centers to run artificial intelligence that it's tilting the balance of GDP growth. Without the feverish spending on computers, the economy would basically not have grown at all. ■ And what is all this spending being done to produce? In essence, the appearance of knowledge. This isn't to denigrate an entire class of machines or their human technicians, but the evidence has been piled up pretty high to show that in many cases, at least with generative artificial intelligence based upon large language models, what we're getting as outputs is mainly good at looking like intelligence, far more than actually exhibiting the thing itself. ■ The temptation to copy the outputs and pass them off as original thoughts has already ensnared many a user. The answers these tools generate are often plausibly correct, and even when they aren't, they at least tend to be written in such a way that they seem convincing (at least to the reader who doesn't know any better). ■ This isn't the first time that copying work has been a high-grade temptation. Nearly 125 years ago, Booker T. Washington lectured his students at the Tuskegee Institute, "We carry a similar kind of deception into our school work when, in the essays which we read and the orations which we deliver, we simply rehearse matter a great deal of which has been copied from some one else. Go into almost any church where there is one of the doctors of divinity to whom I have referred, and you will hear sermons copied out of books and pamphlets. The essays, the orations, the sermons that are not the productions of the people who pretend to write them, all come from this false foundation." ■ The easier it becomes to at least appear as though one possesses a great deal of knowledge, the more important it becomes to emphasize the strengthening of character: Taking ownership of what one actually knows, giving appropriate credit when answers have come from others, showing modesty instead of bluffing overconfidence. The appearance of access to "intelligence" is going to tempt a lot of people into really ill-advised behavior.
October 7, 2025
Conrad Hackett of the Pew Research Center poses an exceptionally reasonable question: "How much influence do public intellectuals have in the present influencer era?". Naturally, the question hinges on several definitions, not the least of which is "Who qualifies as a public intellectual?". ■ There certainly was a time when at least a few of them were easy to identify: Carl Sagan, Milton Friedman, and Vaclav Havel all left deep impressions on society in their times. Today, consistent with Hackett's question, it's harder to know which impressions are really being left. ■ We live in a time crowded with intellectuals but short on those who are really devoted to learning how to move the public. The surplus of intellectuals is generally a blessing; the smart people of prior generations would almost certainly be downright green with envy over the depth and breadth of knowledge available today across an astonishing range of disciplines. The student graduating with an associate's degree in chemistry emerges with more real factual knowledge than any of the alchemists of old, and the same is true across practically every discipline. ■ It is the reluctance or inability to translate that knowledge (from almost any domain) for public consumption that becomes an incapacitating problem. It's one thing to opine among friends, colleagues, or those who are already interested in a subject area, but reaching outside -- in order to persuade those who aren't already interested -- is a very different challenge. ■ Public outreach is a skill calling for both strategy and tactics. One must have a grand vision as well as a firm grasp of particular techniques. More importantly, a real public intellectual must possess the patience to see a long fight all the way through. ■ That patience is key; one of the defining aspects to "influencer" culture is that one can have a meteoric rise one day and be "cancelled" the next. The effective public intellectual doesn't chase momentary virality, but stays within the current of public attention using the tactics at hand (to remain relevant to the public) while strategically advancing a greater cause.
Getting their hands on a small maker of tiny chips
When the subject of your interest is not aware of your existence
"Start calling your parents by their first names"
A joke from The Onion, to be certain, but it's really not bad advice
Bob Ross paintings are being sold to raise funds for public broadcasters
October 6, 2025
Incredibly self-defeating choices
Vaccination rates for the basics -- like the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine -- have sunk below the threshold for herd immunity in a huge number of counties across the United States. USA Today mapped and expanded upon data collected by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, and found that the vaccination rates are below 95% in three-quarters of counties. ■ This is a terrible self-sabotage, on a scale that would look like sabotage if it were being imposed by outside forces rather than being chosen from within. Some things only work if they have widespread consent and commitment, and vaccination for highly contagious diseases like measles is one of those things. ■ Vaccination combines self-interest (who wants to suffer from a nasty and preventable disease?) with community interest, since some people simply cannot be vaccinated, either due to age or existing immunocompromise. Unfortunately, what is rationally accounted-for in public health overlooks a sinister intervening factor: The greed, irrationality, and civic indifference of the cottage industry that has grown up around campaigning against vaccines. ■ Where is the pride in showing respect and concern for one's neighbors? And why do some outlets and institutions persist in amplifying the voices of people who plainly don't understand the purpose or protections of vaccines? ■ It's one thing to be wary of any new medication. Benjamin Franklin lamented that he was a skeptic of an early approach to smallpox inoculation, because his hesitancy led to the death of his four-year-old son. Franklin openly admitted, "I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation". ■ He would undoubtedly beg modern-day Americans to protect themselves and their children with the proven tools easily and readily available to stop dangerous contagious diseases, and he would undoubtedly endorse a vaccine with a track record half a century long (like MMR, which was introduced in 1971). ■ Modern medicine figured out how to halt diseases that used to kill thousands of Americans a year. We have a solution, and even better than a cure, it's preventative. It is much better never to have gotten a disease in the first place than to have been cured of it. ■ It's one thing to be lost, confused, or apprehensive about dealing with new and novel problems, but it's downright daft to surrender to old threats when we know plainly how to stop them.
October 5, 2025
After about six weeks of a complete shutdown, Jaguar Land Rover is restarting production at three manufacturing plants in the UK. They were shut down by a cyberattack in August and have been frozen ever since, not only putting the company's direct employees on ice, but also freezing the enormous supply chains that feed modern automotive manufacturing. What's really bad for Jaguar Land Rover might be catastrophic for some of its captive suppliers. ■ It seems likely that we passed a milestone sometime between ten and twenty years ago without knowing it: The peak of modern production efficiency. Someone will undoubtedly try to fix that date with some precision in a real academic paper, but it's somewhere in that range: Late enough that the gains from Internet-enhanced commerce were largely realized, but cyber threats had not undermined those benefits. Similarly, as far advanced in the gains from trade and specialization as we could reach, but before the reckless dismantling of the pro-trade order (the failure to get the US into the Trans-Pacific Partnership seems to be a real bookend to that era). ■ Whether it happened before or after the 2007-2009 financial panic is difficult to say. The pre-crisis era had greater overall confidence; the post-crisis era had the energy of people trying to make up for lost ground. Regardless, it should be clear to us now that conditions will henceforth be harder than they were then: Antipathy to trade is going to hurt us (semi-permanently, at least), and the overhead costs of dealing with criminal elements among us in cyberspace will permanently shave off some of the peak gains we could have obtained from technological efficiencies. ■ Regrettably, we're left to adjust to a more brittle state of affairs. Supply chains can't be just-in-time anymore, whether because of abrupt changes to tariffs or because of ransomware. Perhaps even worse, the insidious incursion of AI-generated junk content is contaminating the Internet and distorting search results, making the path out even harder to navigate. It turns out that Joni Mitchell may have been a prophet of our times: You really don't know what you've got until it's gone.
October 4, 2025
Hybrid warfare is here to stay
A significant aspect to the Cold War that often gets overlooked is that it was shaped largely by standoffs. The Berlin Wall was the most tangible example, but much of that era was characterized by posturing from behind each side's own lines. ■ The current security environment has turned that old model on its head. We have entered a period of provocative "gray zone" or "hybrid" conflict. The first sign that tactics are outpacing our responses is that so few people would readily recognize those terms. ■ Muscular hand-to-hand combat still occupies enough space in the imagination that the Secretary of Defense very publicly railed against "fat troops" and "fat generals" during an extraordinary assembly of top officers this week. But what's actually happening right now to some of America's treaty allies is that drones are invading the skies, Russian warships are crossing lines and provoking defensive vessels, and hospitals and water systems are coming under cyberattack. ■ Problems like hostile drones in military airspace aren't "fat troops" problems. They are complicated, technology-forward problems. Nobody's going to arm-wrestle a drone out of the skies. Tactical creativity and strategic imagination are both in extremely high demand, because we don't really have "muscle memory" for gray-zone conflict. Yet it's here, and the longer it takes to realize that a sort of dull, persistently low-grade scale of trouble is likely to be here to stay, the farther we're going to fall behind in staging an effective defense.
October 3, 2025
Taylor Swift has conclusively proven that, no matter what happens to terrestrial radio broadcasting, the legacy of pop music remains true to its name. Whether objectively newsworthy or not, her newly released album has been the subject of at least 100 articles in news publications just on its first day. Whatever else the album may or may not be, it is certainly popular. ■ The album has been streamed millions of times, reviewed exhaustively, and been made the subject of scores of podcasts. It is not enough for us to have entertainment, we seem compelled to entertain ourselves by rehashing the entertainment itself seemingly nearly as much as we consume it in the first place. ■ Entertainment can lead to lots of good sensations: Happiness, joy, pleasure, even satisfaction. But one thing that pure entertainment isn't equipped to provide is a sense of fulfillment. Consumption (like listening to music, watching a movie about an album, or looking at photos of a singer) lights up the brain in different ways than original, organic creation. ■ With every passing day, it becomes easier and easier to consume entertainment non-stop anywhere and anytime. Facebook users are even being invited to virtually snap their fingers and produce endless streams of AI-generated video slop. ■ Against these headwinds, we have to be sure that the real creative pursuits get their due share of our time. Without them, something goes missing -- not just at the social level, but for the individual, too. Doing is more rewarding than viewing.
October 2, 2025
James Cridland has built a reputation for anticipating changes to come in radio and related industries, a skill he puts to work in a weekly podcast called the "Podnews Weekly Review". In a recent episode, Cridland interviewed Jeanine Wright of Inception Point AI, a company that uses artificial intelligence to synthesize AI personalities who then "host" recordings that the company feeds into podcasting directories and applications. ■ The company's central selling point is "infinitely" scalable content -- which is to say that because they generate everything using computers rather than people, they can produce a virtually unlimited volume of new content. Cridland's skepticism of the approach is impossible for him to mask in the course of the interview, but even without provocation, Wright unintentionally reveals a distressing ethical hollowness to the business model. ■ Wright volunteered, "[B]ecause our time to production is dramatically less and our costs of production are less, it means that we can surf trends much better than traditional podcasting organizations. So a week ago when Charlie Kirk was shot, we had content about Charlie Kirk up, we had a living biography, we had a content, and a new show about his assassination up within an hour. So when people typed Charlie Kirk into Apple and Spotify, we were three of the top five shows". ■ Not a word about accuracy, tastefulness, tone, or service to the public. Just, in other words, "Someone famous died violently and unexpectedly and we used computers to flood the zone with material allowing us to profit from it faster than anyone else." This is a dreadful turn of events. ■ Sensationalism and yellow journalism have been around for well over a century. But when humans do it, someone at least bears responsibility for making choices along the way. Someone's name -- a reporter or an editor -- stands to be diminished for those times when tastelessness crosses into ghoulishness. But Wright's model expressly rejects even the duty to put a human in the decision process: "I'm releasing 3,000 episodes a week, and I have eight people on my team. There's no way we're listening to the overwhelming majority of our content before it's released." ■ Much like rabbits, once introduced into the wild, computer-synthesized content has a way of propagating uncontrollably. It goes into the datasets that train new artificial intelligence models, and the high-volume production ensures that, like a garden weed, it has the sheer relentlessness to choke out everything else. Even death becomes merely a monetizable opportunity.
October 1, 2025
One of the great sources of wisdom in life is to find two pieces of seemingly equally good advice that are in some sort of conflict with one another. Through this process, the mature mind learns the virtue of appreciating tension -- that life is rarely so much about stark matters of black and white blending into some mushy gray, but rather much more often about seeing that it takes red, green, and blue together to produce white light. ■ A good example: Calvin Coolidge recommended that "If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine of them will run into a ditch before they reach you and you have to battle with only one of them." ■ An apparently opposing piece of advice comes from Benjamin Franklin, who said in his 1749 Poor Richard's Almanack, "What can be done, with Care perform to Day, Dangers unthought-of will attend Delay". ■ Yet it only appears at first glance that these two aphorisms are in conflict. In fact, they are merely in tension: Coolidge's advice appears to suggests doing nothing and obeying inertia, while Franklin's advice seems to suggest a frenetic pace of activity. The tension that binds them is the recognition that time is fleeting -- it is the non-renewable resource that constrains us all. ■ Coolidge's wisdom holds that we shouldn't waste it on frivolous concerns, while Franklin's insight is that time almost always causes compounding effects, whether for good or ill. Both are right. ■ In the opening days of a Federal government shutdown, we ought to carefully ask which problems are worth solving and which are not. As a society, we seem to have assumed that far more than nine out of ten problems can simply be ignored, while also ignoring the perils of Franklin's "dangers unthought-of" making big problems even bigger.
September 28, 2025
Complaining about the habits of youth is one of the most time-honored traditions in all of human history. What in particular the elders complain about changes from generation to generation, but typically it has something to do with social skills: Signs of respect, work ethic, or something alike. One of the concerns most prevalent today is the worry that young people simply don't know how to talk to one another (or to older people) without the presence or intermediation of a smartphone. ■ The simple art of conversation feels very much under threat. For all of the legitimacy that there may be to that complaint, there seems to be something missing from the conversation: The question of what any complaintive elder is doing about it. ■ Conversation is a skill, and like any other communication skill, whether it's writing or reading or flagging a message in semaphore, conversation requires practice. For every complaint lodged about the apparent inability of youth to engage in conversation, the question ought to be posed, "Well, then, what are you doing about it?" ■ Elders need to ask themselves whether they participate in real and sincere conversations with younger people, or whether they spend more time either haranguing the youth in question or, perhaps worse, putting on a transparently insincere show (the gold standard for which might forever be Steve Buscemi's "How do you do, fellow kids?"). ■ It's important to model this art of conversation without appearing (or being) insincere or trite. And if any part of that feels unnatural to elders, then we should take it as a sign that perhaps we are leaving the much-maligned youths unattended and unaided in a quest to improve themselves to meet expectations without guidance. ■ Certain low-hanging conversational fruit will almost always fall flat: Youth culture will almost always seem foreign and weird to anyone over about the age of 30, much as prior generations' youth culture have typically seemed unfashionable (at least until selectively reappropriated, like reviving an old fashion in clothing or sampling a classic song in a new hit). ■ So we have to find ways to introduce conversations and ask questions, conduct interviews, and perform the basic functions of verbal exchange without defaulting to subjects that have unimaginative answers. Likewise, elders have to resist the urge to make every interaction an uncomfortable flashpoint ("Put that phone down! Why can't you just talk to us?"). ■ Who doesn't rely upon a crutch from time to time in a social circumstance? There's not that much difference between resorting to "Nice weather we're having" as a safety icebreaker and retreating to the security blanket of a smartphone screen rather than strike up a conversation. If we simply make fun of the crutch, then we're not going to do anything productive to help bridge the gap and introduce those new skills. ■ Shame on us if all we do is make fun of people younger than us for spending time on their phones if we aren't affirmatively (and helpfully!) engaging with them in social circumstances, in workplace environments, and in daily life. Adults need to model how adolescents are ultimately going to be accepted as peers among their elders, because it always happens sooner than we think. It's entirely our own fault if they turn out to be terrible conversationalists because we haven't given them the encouragement and practice to be better.
September 27, 2025
A common way to sign-off from a broadcast news story is to ask for audience feedback. It's often phrased something like, "We'd love to know what you think! Send your comments to..." ■ The instinct to solicit feedback is perfectly natural. Giving people the sense that they contribute to creating the product is a terrific way to build audience loyalty, and most people who place themselves in the public eye are either wired or conditioned to think of feedback as a form of applause. ■ But most of the time, the sign-off is driven by a faulty call to action. "What you think" is often irrational, unhelpful, or inadequately informed. Opinions are among the cheapest space-fillers on Earth -- a perpetually renewable resource. Most really don't need to be amplified. ■ A considerably better question would be, "What did we forget to ask?" It is not a question designed to provoke the same amount of response. But it would be a more useful prompt, because journalists and interviewers should always be interested in improving the questions they ask. The general public usually does not possess the expertise required to offer high-quality commentary. ■ The average member of the public is, however, well-positioned to know what questions pique their own curiosity. Moreover, journalists ought to welcome good-faith efforts to help them identify their own blind spots.
A study of more than 22,000 people found that people who are conscientious, active, and generally agreeable turn out to have a lower risk of mortality than their peers who do not. It's not an especially shocking result: Being careless would seem to have obvious deleterious effects on one's health and safety, and the importance of remaining active is among the central premises of most geriatric care. ■ What's interesting comes from the conclusion of the study: Particular personality traits taken individually have "little incremental predictive power" relative to mortality, but "the aggregated predictive value of items was stronger". In other words, it's not the individual factors so much as the collective basket of the right ones that matters. ■ The person who happens to be "active", "lively", "organized", "responsible", "hardworking", "thorough", and "helpful" is thus the person probably in the most enviable position. It does seem almost odd that these traits, which would seem to have life=preserving merit individually, are perhaps most protective as a sort of cohesive disposition. While the study's authors have discouraged readers from taking the conclusions as deterministic, is it really that hard to conclude that those traits are worth inculcating in young people? ■ Human nature is powerfully entrenched at the species level, and many of us express at least a few pretty strong characteristics that are obvious practically from birth. But we're not really born learning to express the very specific traits underneath the "Big Five"; that is, there's a pretty good chance that one is born naturally inclined to be somewhere on the extroversion scale, but being specifically "active" or "lively" comes at least in part out of practice. The practice may simply consist of being in the right environment to take advantage of opportunities to be that way.
September 25, 2025
Curiously, one of the best tools for counteracting the allure of the doomscroll comes in the form of a widely-used Amazon device: The humble Kindle reader. ■ The various Kindle models make use of one of the best yet most-underused inventions around: Electronic ink. E-ink is gentler on the eyes than light projected from a screen, offering an experience that is less taxing on the brain. And what too few people realize is that you don't have to pay Amazon for everything you read on the Kindle. ■ Both the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg make thousands of books available for free. Many or even most are out of copyright -- which quite often means they are also out of print. But they have been carefully digitized and can be exported in just a couple of easy steps to any Kindle reader. ■ What we too often forget is that much of what we acquire in high school and even in college is a survey of information, not a deep dive. We become familiar with famous historical names without realizing that many of them wrote books that may be worth reading. In a huge number of cases, old problems sound a whole lot like modern ones. That's because our circumstances change, but human nature rarely does. ■ Thanks to the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg, we can go back and check the work of our predecessors. Some of it is garbage. But surprisingly often, there are thoroughly relatable perspectives to be found in the materials they have pulled off the dusty shelves and made accessible to our convenient devices. ■ There's great reward to be found in reading these old books. Reading them on a modern digital device -- for free! -- is a tremendous antidote to doomscrolling. Many a modern person will come to regret hours lost to TikTok or Snapchat, but few people have ever resented the choice to spend time reading books. That we can do so for free is a marvelous gift that a small but dedicated cadre of people have made to the human family.
September 24, 2025
Stock-market index funds are widely used for retirement savings, and for good reason: Their passive approach to investing, coupled with relatively low administrative costs, insulates them from much of the oversized "take" placed on actively-managed investments. Money managers are very good at assuring themselves a substantial return on investment, even when they can't guarantee the same for their clients. For a very large share of investors, the best bet is to buy into index funds and reinvest for a very long time. ■ One oddity of index funds, though, is that they are generally weighted by market capitalization. That is, the biggest companies are held in the largest amounts. A titanic index fund like the Fidelity 500 Index Fund or the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund won't hold equal numbers of shares (or total share value) in each of 500 different companies; they hold the companies with the highest total market value (number of shares times price per share) in the largest amounts. ■ For both of those funds (the two largest index funds, according to MarketWatch), and for many others, more than 20% of their value is being carried in holdings of just four companies: Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon. This should have the economically-minded on something of an alert. Not only is that a lot of weight to be putting on a very small number of companies, it's a heavy concentration in a field subject to a lot of speculation. Nvidia is huge because it is the hottest domestic name in artificial intelligence. ■ But that industry is almost entirely speculative -- its future is utterly unknowable. And people are paying more than 50 times earnings to get a piece of Nvidia. While it doesn't mean that the market is wrong about that company's future, it does mean that a whole lot of things must go right in order for the price to be justified. ■ For perspective: 25 years ago, General Electric (then the definitive diversified industrial conglomerate) was the biggest holding in Vanguard's S&P 500 index fund, representing 4.5% of assets. The top four holdings in the year 2000 crossed three industrial sectors and made up less than 13% of the total fund -- meaning that the index (and the fund tracking it) were much less susceptible to volatility in just one top company or sector. Things were even more diversified by 2002, after the dot-com tech bubble popped (which was back when tech firms were concentrated more in the Nasdaq than in the wider market). ■ We can and should hope that things turn out for the best and that market fanaticism is ultimately justified by fantastic performance. But history doesn't care much for hope, and the lots-of-nest-eggs-in-one-basket approach runs the risk of turning out very badly for a great number of Americans.
September 21, 2025
An initiative led by a professor at the University of Northern Iowa is getting area men together for "Men's Sheds", gatherings to learn new skills or participate in service activities. It's an effort to address problems of social isloation that tend to get pretty bad among adult men in America, particularly after retirement. ■ Fraternal organizations used to take up a lot of this space, but they've been in a deeply regrettable decline for decades. It would be a symptom of better civic health if people spontaneously formed and sustained these kinds of activities, but if they're not doing it, the university deserves applause for stepping in to help pilot-test the model. ■ Young men with nothing productive to do have been recognized as a social hazard since at least the time of ancient Greece. But older men without ties to community and productive activities are a poorly-recognized danger to themselves: A whole bunch of pathologies are tied to growing old and under-attached. ■ The real challenge is in finding ways to scale up an effort like this. A university town ought to be, relatively speaking, a fantastic place to age -- with more than the usual number of cultural, educational, and social events. But a lot of people choose to age in place far from college towns. Then it becomes a problem of both access and initiative.
Language-software company Babbel claims its use has fallen by half since the early 2000s.
Touchscreens: Great for phones, calamitous for cars
Drivers need to be able to do things without taking their eyes off the road. Touchscreens are just about the worst possible interface for those activities. Bring back dials, knobs, and switches!
Cambridge University claims its Peterhouse hall was the second building in all of Britain to get electric light -- in 1884
September 20, 2025
It may not be especially tasteful to laugh at the misfortunes of others, but watching what happens (and how people react) when things go wrong can be a tough temptation to resist -- as long as we know that nobody faced real peril from the incident. Nobody died when Mark Zuckerberg's live demo of Facebook's AI-powered glasses went sideways. That creates a pretty good permission structure for the rest of us to point and laugh. ■ Buggy demonstrations aren't necessarily a reason to run away from a product (though they might ratchet up a sense of "caveat emptor"). But if it comes to light that erroneous assumptions are guiding the creators, that might be another story. ■ Zuckerberg, who still controls a majority of voting shares in Meta/Facebook and thus is empowered to do anything he wants with the company, has hyped the glasses by saying that those who don't get them may fall to a "significant cognitive disadvantage". Those are strong words. ■ Even assuming that artificial intelligence goes through several more generational-scale improvements, there's a very real hazard in assuming that it would be "cognitively" advantageous to have it beamed into one's retinas all day. There are certainly discrete tasks for which glasses acting as a permanent heads-up display could be advantageous: It might be nice, for instance, to be able to read a book while taking a walk outside. ■ But real human cognition is characterized by incomplete thoughts, sentence fragments, and abstractions that we imagine taking shape in the world around us (it's one reason why people often break eye contact when telling a story -- they're reconstructing fragments of memory in the imagination). If we're not careful to leave lots of room for those incomplete thoughts, we're likely to bungle the whole process of thinking. ■ Trying to gain "cognitive advantage" by dragging a computer into the loop, in part to make more of those thoughts seem complete, is a surefire way to miss the point. The real impairment may come from introducing a digital interlocutor with no sense of when to shut up.
September 19, 2025
In case the troubles of the world ever get you down, a helpful perspective-generating exercise is to read the scientific research which concludes that the entire population of human beings once hinged on just 1,280 breeding individuals -- a population about equivalent to the enrollment of the smallest high school in the Central Iowa Metropolitan League. In other words, quite the bottleneck. ■ The human species survived, and thanks in part to the persistence of spontaneous mutations in our genes, our ancestors between that bottleneck and today managed to differentiate well enough that we don't all look alike. It could have gotten pretty monocultural there. ■ But while thanking our lucky stars that we managed to persist through and beyond that near-extinction event, we ought to ask ourselves whether we're doing right by that great good fortune. Other humans are not the enemy: Nature is. ■ Nature's chronic indifference to our fate (at the level of the individual as well as the species) is what endangers us most. Nature blows up volcanoes that can block out the Sun and showers down deadly rocks from space. Nature has been known to send killer pandemic viruses our way, too. ■ There are two menaces who should be recognized as the obstacles to human progress: One intentionally brings pain to others, out of greed, bloodlust, malice, or some other deviance. The other concentrates attention on exaggerated differences among us, creating strife and conflict where none need exist. ■ Whenever those menaces gain influence, attention, or power, they sap our already finite supplies of human energy that could otherwise be put to work solving the problems of nature and its never-ending threats to our survival. We only have a limited amount of time, a limited number of brains, and a limited supply of resources. Whatever of those we waste on sadism and cruelty and petty tribalism are no longer available to solve our greater problems, and that brings shame on us.
September 18, 2025
Long-haul newspaper delivery routes
The Quad City Times of Davenport, Iowa, will cease printing at its local press on September 30th and outsource printing to a sister publication under Lee Enterprises: The Times of Northwest Indiana. ■ In good weather, it's a 3-hour drive down Interstate 80 from Munster, Indiana, to Davenport, Iowa. It's not the first printing-press consolidation undertaken by Lee, nor is it the only long-haul newspaper delivery route: The Kansas City Star, for instance, is printed in Des Moines. ■ It is unclear what point remains to printing a daily newspaper that starts the morning already older than a gas station tuna salad sandwich. The Des Moines production site prints 15 different newspapers. No matter how ably a production manager is able to mass-produce those various editions, there's no way to get them all printed unless at least some of them have deadlines that land sometime before network TV prime time. That has obvious detrimental effects for the timeliness of the news being reported. ■ In parts of the Des Moines area, the Register is delivered by carriers during a window between midnight and 1:00 am, only for the papers to sit on front steps until sunrise, containing nothing fresher than what appeared on the 10:00 pm local news the night before. ■ If dedicated local printing is no longer an economic possibility, then there's really only one playbook that makes any sense for most newspapers in America: (1.) Go all-digital for the daily "edition". (2.) Publish a bunch of high-value, narrowly-targeted electronic newsletters (not Axios-style morning bullet lists, but real original reporting conveyed in high-quality writing). (3.) Finally, publish just one really well-thought-out weekly print edition, full of high-quality photography and journalism that's deserving of a quality typographic layout. There are still plenty of stories that are much better told on an attractive printed page than on any smartphone app, but probably not enough to justify killing a bunch of trees seven days a week.
September 16, 2025
Plant perennials and watch the roots
Anyone with a talent for keeping plants knows that the visible part above the soil is never more than half of the story. It's what gets noticed, of course, but the attention it gets is disproportional to the real tale. ■ The health of what's below the surface matters as much as anything you can see. What happens below is especially important to sustaining life through harsh seasons like winter: A good root system for a tree can be seven times the size of the leafy crown. ■ Activity in most plants doesn't have to be visible for growth to take place. A plant will need sunlight eventually, but flowers and leaves are generally disposable, while a healthy root structure is not. To the uninitiated, what's visible can become a distraction. ■ It's surprising how much "green thumb" advice applies to human relations just as well: Plant perennials once and you'll reap rewards for years to come. Find what will survive the winter and come back stronger when the days grow longer. Don't mistake a bunch of visible foliage for health below the surface. Consider the whole system.
September 15, 2025
Technology columnist Christopher Mims of the Wall Street Journal observes, "One way I'm different than 10 years ago is, even when I feel I have some expertise on a topic, I'm hesitant to weigh in, because I know how *dangerous* knowing a little (but not the full story) can be", adding that his observation is "a thank-you note to those who are ready with deep domain area expertise and can articulately weigh in when their moment comes". ■ One of the distinguishing characteristics of knowledge in the digital era is the prevalence of quantification. It is as though the old managerial proverb, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it", has been applied wholesale to how information is evaluated. It started, to some extent, when Google first began scoring websites on the basis of backlinks from other sites as a partial indicator of quality. ■ Quantification spread through all sorts of other mechanisms (upvotes/downvotes, for instance), and has reached its apogee (thus far) in the large language models that are so big and active that they are tilting the scales of electricity demand. ■ The comments from Mims value what we might call "encyclopedia knowledge" -- not what necessarily appears in an encyclopedia, per se, but knowledge that is valued because it has the approval of someone with credible authority. Encyclopedia editors don't put knowledge to a popular vote; they check with subject-matter authorities. An unpopular answer is no more right nor wrong because of its unpopularity. Quantification matters not one bit to the truth. ■ Our contemporary problem is that there is no way to readily reconcile the encyclopedia-knowledge approach with a quantifiable methodology like what drives an LLM. ■ The high-minded approach applauded by Mims is not only incompatible with quantifying or scoring knowledge, it's expressly contradictory. If the people with real knowledge intentionally hold back until a subject is squarely within their domain of compentence, then they will usually be lapped by people running a race to be first and loudest. The resulting imbalance of content gives the advantage to quantifiable frequency -- saying things a lot, rather than waiting to say them with authority.
September 14, 2025
The best day at Wrigley Field since Ferris
Every era needs heroes who distinguish themselves with displays of bravery and self-sacrifice. But a good society that treasures what's good for the individual should reserve a place for some characters who publicly walk an unashamedly joyful path. ■ For a long time, America had Betty White, a person so popular she only accrued a 3% disapproval rating (presumably concentrated among people who misunderstood the question). The seat has been vacant since her passing at the end of 2021. ■ Perhaps, though, her crown can be perched atop the head of Anthony Rizzo, the Major League Baseball player who just retired as a Chicago Cub. Rizzo, who will forever be featured on the highlight reels of the Cubs' 2016 World Series win, managed to have the most charmed day at Wrigley Field since Ferris Bueller. ■ He threw the first pitch. He sat right in the path of a home run ball drilled into the bleachers. He led the Seventh Inning Stretch alongside Eddie Vedder and Cindy Crawford. ■ But in addition to having one of the best days ever at a ballpark, he managed to shed a little light on a good cause, too, wearing a jersey bearing the signatures of child cancer patients. Betty White had the cause of animals; Anthony Rizzo, himself a cancer survivor, has a long life ahead to model joy and be an ambassador for the indisputably worthy cause of children facing cancer. His popularity will probably always lag a bit in Cleveland, but even Betty had a tiny contingent of detractors. For the rest of us, though, it's good to have sincerely likeable people to remind us that "the pursuit of happiness" is a worthwhile thing in its own right.
September 13, 2025
Russia's incursion into Polish airspace with at least 17 drones was several things. But on one thing, Polish leadership is emphatic: It was not a mistake. ■ Russia has obviously been using drones relentlessly in its attacks against Ukraine. And Ukraine does share a border with Poland. But if the Russian ambassador to the UN says their drones couldn't have reached Poland by accident, then it's time to assume that what happened was a deliberate probing attack. ■ As dreadful as this is to contemplate, we are compelled to assume it is true unless proven otherwise. The perpetrator has done nothing to earn the benefit of the doubt. ■ It's an awful reality that the whole continent of Europe is under much more of a direct threat than was the case for the last 30 years. A test of Poland's air defenses isn't just a goof or a lark -- it's an obvious escalatory step. NATO needs to be clearly and unambiguously unified in putting Russia on notice that an attack on one is an attack on all.
September 12, 2025
"Goodness should be accompanied by wisdom"
It's hard to imagine just how head-spinning the pace of progress must have seemed in the United States around the turn from the 19th into the 20th Century. Reliable electrical service was exploding on the public scene, alongside the first American-made automobile (1896). The new century ushered in the first long-distance radio broadcasts (1902), the airplane (1903), and the first standards for safe drinking water (1905). ■ We flatter ourselves in thinking that we are the first generation to experience dramatic technological changes with big social consequences. It's been done before. But we truly deceive ourselves if we think that what matters most is how smart we think the changes will make us. ■ In 1900, the governor of New York, one Theodore Roosevelt, wrote a magazine article proposing, "Bodily vigor is good, and vigor of intellect is even better, but far above both is character [...] in the long run, in the great battle of life, no brilliancy of intellect, no perfection of bodily development, will count when weighed in the balance against that assemblage of virtues, active and passive, of moral qualities, which we group together under the name of character; and if between any two contestants, even in college sport or in college work, the difference in character on the right side is as great as the difference of intellect or strength the other way, it is the character side that will win." ■ 125 years later, the same is true: Character is still more dispositive than any other factor in life. Our eagerness to discover computer-aided "superintelligence" had better not overtake our interest in forming better people. ■ We can't afford to be shell-shocked by change any more than our forebears could have done so in 1900. A lot of people with bad intentions are grasping every prospective weapon in reach, because they see personal advantage in it. ■ Good people need to double down on the centrality of good character while at the same time seeking to level up on their ability to use it. It's hard work, but that's our duty. In Roosevelt's words, "it is of much more importance for the good of mankind that our goodness should be accompanied by wisdom than that we should merely be harmless."
September 11, 2025
We indulge quite a bit in wide-eyed awe at the pace of technological progress in our world today, but it's worth noting that not all progress is advanced by technology. Just 75 years ago, more than half of the world's adult population was illiterate. Half. And that was a colossal increase over 1900, when four out of every five adults worldwide were illiterate. ■ These facts do overlap with technology, too, because prior to Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph and Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone in the 1870s, nobody had ever heard another human voice recorded or transmitted over either time or distance. (Recordings were made as early as the 1850s, but nobody had figured out a playback mechanism). ■ So we must consider that the world of just 150 years ago -- merely five familial generations, by the usual estimation -- was overwhelmingly limited to what was transmitted orally. Some specific countries attained higher literacy rates earlier than others, but access to the basic tools of literacy was frequently controlled as a means of subjugation in the world of not that long ago. ■ A world of oral communications is very different from a literate one. When we think we are among friends who will probably forget most of our scurrilous rumors and unhinged overreactions, we say different things than what we might choose to chisel in stone or publish in a newspaper. The habits are different, the guardrails are lower, and the discipline is far less in evidence. ■ It wasn't a mistake to bring literacy to the masses; it was one of the greatest victories in the history of striving for human potential. But it hasn't been a long time for the new conditions to prevail and retrain culture. ■ In 1960, the world adult literacy rate was 42%. And just three or four decades later, we suddenly had the Internet, on which anything could be published or shared in an instant with the entire globe, in printed words or in audio (or video). The tools at hand encourage instant reactions, big emotions, quick snippets, and hot takes -- effectively reverting back to the pre-1870s world of oral communications, but suddenly with a permanent (and worldwide) record. ■ As we marvel at what technology can do, it's equally important to ponder what behaviors we indulge and encourage with our social rules. As we have become more literate, we should have been freeing ourselves from what dragged down our ancestors in the earlier era of oral transmission -- rumors, bias, and tribalism. Every word spoken, sentence written, or act undertaken constructs the world to follow. Never in all of history has that impact been magnified like it is today.
September 9, 2025
At what point do we declare a reading crisis?
Reuters: "Over 30% of U.S. students in their last year of high school lack basic reading skills [...] 45% of high school seniors lack basic math skills". Surely we should call this a crisis by now.
A murder arrest more than 30 years later
DNA connects a newborn left to die in 1992 to the mother, who now faces first-degree murder charges. This is exactly why safe-haven laws are so important.
China is finding buyers for its airliners
Airliners are highly complex systems, even at the 90-passenger size, so it's worth watching as China develops a homegrown industry in large aircraft. Boeing and Airbus have held a duopoly on the really big airliners, with Embraer holding its own in the smaller range, perhaps especially after Mitsubishi shut down its regional jet program. ■ The aircraft themselves will almost certainly prove themselves airworthy enough (flight is pretty unforgiving of flaws), and most of us won't be able to credibly gauge whether they're particularly good or bad. Don't just watch the product itself, watch what's being learned about how to do really complex things. ■ Just as has been the case with the development of China's aircraft carriers, it's not just the output, but the process that is worthy of note. That process forms a whole different discipline from the technical and engineering management of tangible things like civil works projects. In an increasingly contentious international economic and security environment, it's wise not to underestimate the value of learning how to make those abstract systems go.
Protest burns Nepal's parliament building
The BBC offers a head-snapping observation: "So far, the protesters have not spelt out their demands apart from rallying under the broader anti-corruption call. The protests appear spontaneous, with no organised leadership."
States can't grow if their cities don't
A study regarding Nebraska's state economy warns that Omaha and Lincoln are falling behind comparable metro areas in job growth rates. It also notes "that Omaha and Lincoln account for roughly 60% of Nebraska's jobs and wages". People overstate a lot of things about lazy divides like "red state" and "blue state", but the reality is that virtually every state is a combination of large (even dominant) metropolitan areas and lots of smaller communities, and everyone has a vested interest in the broad well-being of all types of places.
September 6, 2025
Even if they don't know what it means in detail, most people probably recognize version numbering associated with the names of computer programs and apps: v.1.2.3 or v.10.8.91. The point of these is to tell us at what stage a program has been locked down and released with major updates (the first numeral), minor but important ones (the second numeral), and basic maintenance updates (the final numeral). ■ Versioning is an important concept within computer programming, because it's a significant reminder that no program is ever going to work flawlessly on version 1.0. It simply doesn't happen. Steps must be taken that are iterative; the first draft is never completely right. ■ Pop culture gives us plenty of examples of artists who seem to have great ideas that spring forth fully formed on the first draft. And it's entirely possible that some people have the gift of seeing great paintings projected, complete, onto a blank campus or imagining entire songs before pounding them out on a keyboard for the first time. (Think of Paul McCartney spontaneously composing "Get Back".) ■ This artistic expression, though, should not be taken as a substitute for how to really get things done. It discourages the rest of us if we imagine that an idea must be perfect on its first try and that all will be well once we simply get the performance out. ■ This creates a sense of failure when a first draft doesn't look exactly right, and it's not just this or that draft of a creative work that matters. It means the same thing when we're building human institutions. We have to be able to look at our problems and realize that we will have to take steps -- versions, even -- to get to desirable results. ■ We need fortitude and endurance and persistence in order to get things to go right, and we have to realize there will be further versions down the road. Most further versions should be steps forward, but occasionally a new version is an unexpected step back. That doesn't mean the project stops: It means a period of intense debugging. ■ We need to take the hint from the programmers and realize that a perfect end state is never going to happen: Circumstances will see to that. A lot of life -- personally, socially, and politically -- can be viewed as an exercise in updating versions. One has to be ready to implement a freeze from time to time, not because the product is perfect, but because sometimes you have to be satisfied that enough progress has been made that it's time to consolidate some gains.
September 5, 2025
Kiefer Sutherland wants to bring back Jack Bauer
The original series was of a time and place. We should probably leave it there.
September 4, 2025
Microsoft has released its late-1970s version of BASIC as an open-source project.
Las Vegas hits a 6-month losing streak
Six straight months of declining tourism. There was a 12% drop in July alone. Locals attribute it to a combination of economic anxiety at home and a drop in tourism from abroad.
Government plans to rescind policy punishing airlines for being late
With the airlines running closer to full capacity than was the case for 70 years, it's hard to avoid delays. There just isn't a great deal of slack in the system.
September 3, 2025
Want more housing? Zone for tiny homes.
Broadening the definitions of housing rules makes it easier to put people into shelter
Atlanta's going to lose its dead-tree paper
At the end of the year, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution goes all-digital
"A strong Ukrainian military is the strongest security guarantee there is"
Once again, Kaja Kallas (currently at the EU) has the clearest view of the situation
When autocrats are shooting the breeze, what topics are on their minds? A "hot mic" moment captured between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping seems to have answered that question: they're talking about trying to live forever. ■ It's not an especially deep philosophical desire; few human feelings come closer to universality than the fear of death. Almost everyone has it. ■ Nor is it especially advanced thinking: Even without taking a sojourn to the weirder corners of transhumanism, there have been lots of widely-reported advancements in bio-engineering, even including steps towards 3D printing of brand-hew organs using healthy donor cells from the intended recipient. ■ Thinking hopefully about these possibilities isn't weird on its own. If we could reliably and cheaply create rejection-resistant organs from our own cells, that could be transformational for health and life-changing for millions of deserving people. Some wild things have been happening in medical technology, and that tends to spark imaginative forecasts about the future. ■ What is weird, though, is that despite all their trappings of power, neither of the politicians involved in the conversation comes across as a deep thinker -- or even a modestly bright one. Normal people might well muse aloud about the possibility of living to 100 or 150, and might even give a fleeting thought to what it might mean to live forever. (Again, nothing new: Immortal characters have factored into human stories since the very first gods and demigods.) ■ Deep thinkers with great power here on Earth, though, would naturally stop to consider the consequences of their own choices. Specifically: Am I building a world in which I would be welcomed a century from now? ■ A person can live for a century and still be missed when they are gone -- think of Betty White, Bob Newhart, Norman Borlaug, or any number of beloved grandparents and great-grandparents. But all of these souls are missed because they intentionally left behind good in the world while living. ■ That's not the way Xi or Putin will be remembered, and they certainly ought to know it. Joseph Stalin was born in 1878 and Mao Zedong was born in 1893, which would bring them both under the 150-year mark even today. Surely both would have faced serious consequences for their barbaric decisions by now. The successors to those genocidal dictators are making similar evil in the world today, and the world shouldn't forgive them, now or 100 years from now.
September 2, 2025
What Dick Portillo did with his buyout cash
The guy might be even better at making investment decisions than at making sausages. And he was really good at the sausages.
A nuclear power plant in Michigan with an 800-megawatt capacity is about to be restarted, making it the first in the country to be officially restarted. 800 megawatts is a big chunk of electricity: The Lower 48 States have been oscillating between about 400,000 and 600,000 megawatt-hours for the past week, about 100,000 of which have come from nuclear plants. The Michigan restart probably won't be the last, either: The Duane Arnold plant near Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is also in line for a restart. ■ The Palisades plant has a number of credible detractors, and reasonable objections should be faithfully reviewed. But we also need to account for the knowledge that nuclear power is a decidedly stable source of carbon-free electricity, and if we're going to get ahead of the consequences of generations of fossil-fuel use, then we need to electrify even more of the economy and do it without emitting more carbon. That means renewables and nuclear power, hand-in-hand. ■ There's a lot of optimistic talk about small modular reactors -- simplified, scaled-down nuclear plants -- including at the site where the Michigan plant is being rebooted. They're talking about installing twin 300-megawatt units there, for another 600 megawatts total. As long as the power isn't entirely sucked up by new demand from data centers (a very real issue), then the restart and expansion ought to be a net social positive.
Mick Ryan, Australian retired-general-turned-war-theorist, has observed that the latest giant military parade through Beijing was mainly devoid of surprises, though Ryan does note that China's capacity for developing and manufacturing new military hardware seems to have expanded quite a bit. The whole affair was a spectacle for the purpose of spectacle, featuring front-row seats for Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin. ■ In the modern era, big military parades like this are generally put on for chumps: A victory parade is one thing, but a parade to show off big guns and big missiles is really just a way to burn through a whole lot of cash in return for (usually) mandatory applause. That doesn't mean China's arsenal isn't potentially impressive, nor that the US should ignore the consequences of our own hostile behavior towards nations that ought to be easy friends of ours. (This is, for instance, a really stupid time to be cutting off funding for Radio Free Asia and other levers of public influence abroad.) ■ But a parade doesn't reveal anything about whether a country has organized its military in the right way to win conflicts. The top-down orientation of China's People's Liberation Army is a strategic deadweight, especially compared with the way that the United States has historically encouraged and rewarded initiative at lower levels of leadership. ■ The other thing masked by the mere spectacle and showmanship of a parade is the thoroughly unstable superstructure of China's military. The People's Liberation Army isn't sworn to protect the country; it's there to preserve, protect, and defend the Communist Party. There's no way to make that a stable platform in perpetuity. ■ That doesn't mean it can't stick around for a long time (it obviously already has), but we should never overlook the role of morale in successful warfare. And to fight for the preservation of a self-serving party is a different motive than to fight for one's country. No parade can truly reveal the effects of that kind of moral decay.
September 1, 2025
Labor Day isn't an expressly patriotic holiday in the same fashion as Independence Day or Memorial Day, but it tends to attract a fair amount of flag-waving on its own as people celebrate with parades, lake days, and other outdoor events. It isn't uncommon to hear a few patriotic songs in the air on the holiday, either. ■ One of the best of those themes is Neil Diamond's "America". And it has become increasingly evident that there are two camps among Americans who hear it: One hears a joyful anthem of hope when Diamond sings that "Everywhere around the world, they're coming to America". ■ A different camp hears those same words and concludes that it's a threat. More often than not, there's an aspect of economic jealousy involved. It's a faulty conclusion for many reasons, not least of which that the history of the country has always been one of immigration and assimilation. But it's also particularly faulty in light of the holiday. ■ Nobody has ever been able to disentangle the identity of America from the notion of work. This is a country that invites and encourages hard work and the collection of the fruits of one's own labors. The proof of that is found in our continuing struggle to heal the nation's original sin of slavery, when people were inhumanely deprived of their liberty and forced into servitude. There will long be work to do to heal that wound. ■ We have to conclude that for everyone else, America has broadly held the promise of opportunity born out of one's own work. Those who hear Neil Diamond and think of hope are the ones who are right, of course. The whole point is that everyone brings something new and fresh to the community. In the words of the song, they've "got a dream they've come to share". ■ Most people end up spending most of the income they produce, and saving (or investing) what remains. That should mean to us that new arrivals in a big economy like ours are simply going to "grow the pie" -- they will do work, but they'll put others to work with what they consume. It's really quite improbable for people to be displaced from the economy by new arrivals; the growth is shared, whether it's intentional or not. It's a mark of strength and honor that we invite people to join the dream and share in the resulting growth.
Stop the bots from breaking the Internet
AI content-crawler bots now comprise a huge share of web traffic, slowing down browsing for everyone
Real costs to political pressure on the Federal Reserve
"[P]olitical pressure shocks increase inflation strongly and persistently [...] increasing political pressure 50% as much as Nixon for six months increases the U.S. price level by 8%"
August 31, 2025
When a company wants to bring in more revenues, it generally has a few options: Expand its offerings, enter untapped markets, or begin offering (or emphasize) a premium tier of products or services. These options almost always come with costs, so costs and benefits have to be weighed against probabilities of success. ■ It's no surprise that acquisitions play such a large role in business, given that those transactions at least theoretically reduce the hazards associated with the first two options. But moving into premium tiers is usually something that has to come from within. It's not always a straight path from existing markets into a land of higher prices. ■ Offering a premium option can be a tricky matter. With products, it's often fairly straightforward: When a product is plainly better than the other goods around, people can often tell. Honda introduced Acura, Toyota has Lexus, and Hyundai has Genesis, just to pick some obvious examples from the well-known world of automobiles. As long as what's coming off the assembly line for the cheaper mainstream product is basically respectable, consumers often stand ready to be talked into demonstrably better items. ■ Services are different. For whatever reason, expectations seem to anchor harder in the service world than among goods. It's easier to believe that Holiday Inn is going to spin up an economy-class hotel chain than to believe that Super 8 is going to enter the market for five-star resorts. This is especially the case when consumers have accrued years of previous brand experience at lower prices, deciding what aggravations and irritations are worth suffering for a good deal. They don't readily forget those frustrations. ■ Thus, it is hard to believe that notoriously budget-oriented Spirit Airlines will successfully manage to add premium offerings in its scramble to adopt a profitable path out of two bankruptcy declarations in one year. People tend to forgive service quality shortcuts if they think they're getting a great deal. But the baggage that goes along with disappointing low-cost experiences tends to carry over into any taste of experience with something branded as premium. Considering the low base from which they're starting, Spirit might not want to bet the company on a pivot to premium.
August 30, 2025
There's something almost poetic about the choice to have Oasis perform most of the brief American leg of their Live '25 tour over the Labor Day holiday weekend. The band is, after all, among the world's most visibly dysfunctional family businesses. ■ Labor Day, of course, originated with the labor union movement, not with family businesses. But union membership has long ago shrunk to a small fraction of employment -- just 9.9% of the US labor force overall, and less than 6% in the private sector -- while at least one estimate holds that 63% of the workforce is employed at family-run companies. So, in a sense, Oasis is right at home in the USA. ■ The Brothers Gallagher simply take the family business model to a higher level of difficulty: Combining work and family is inevitably complex, but to do so quite literally in the spotlight as performing artists makes it an order of magnitude harder. (Not to mention that most family businesses don't involve the arts and the big personalities that come with them.) ■ People talk a lot about work families, but it's a concept that has a lot more superficial attraction than real, deep meaning. Co-workers often become friends, even extremely close friends on many occasions, but rarely do they actually behave quite like family. ■ That's probably for the best, since we should be careful to distinguish between those two spaces in life whenever possible. In one, each person is irreplaceable. In another, everyone is (in the end) completely replaceable. Navigating the overlap between the two is such an innate challenge that it attracts no small amount of academic interest. ■ Whether or not Oasis ever toured again, the brothers would still be brothers -- just with a whole lot more work-related baggage attached to their personal relationship. So it's to their credit and worth celebrating, even for those who don't care for their music, that this particularly high-profile family enterprise has overcome its toughest schism.
August 29, 2025
Middle management isn't going anywhere
A few short years ago, the word "blockchain" was used like an incantation: People inserted it without rhyme or reason, suggesting it could fix any business or managerial problem. It was an all-purpose business catchphrase: "Blockchain is going to revolutionize [fill in the blank]". Few people had any idea what they were actually proposing, of course, but the element of the new and exotic caused many an audience member to lose their critical faculties. ■ Lots of blockchain-based promises are still made, of course, but "AI" has had a better run of growth lately. It's on such a hot streak that people are making straight-faced prognostications like arguing that AI will widely replace middle management because tasks will automatically assigned to both humans and automated agents. ■ Among many problems with this concept is the evidence that people are far more entranced with the "look and feel" of work, rather than work itself. Facebook/Meta just got caught impersonating living celebrities with dedicated chatbots -- when the obvious permission structures to make such use of names and likenesses already exists. We already know about as much about Taylor Swift as we could possibly need, yet someone at Facebook has been off programming a chatbot to fake even more. ■ Middle management is never going to be sexy, but there's a reason it has persisted long past the automation of many other tasks: Just like the US military has always depended upon a range of officers from the generals and admirals on down to the lieutenants, it has also depended upon non-commissioned officers to get real work done. ■ Cheerleaders for AI are going to get some things right, but when they imagine revolutionary turmoil in the workplace, they're largely just echoing the blockchain hype of a few years ago with new lyrics. As long as anyone can still define strategy, operations, and tactics as important but different levels of approaching a mission, there will always remain a place for humans to handle that middle ground.
August 28, 2025
US will sell 3,350 missiles to Ukraine
The more than 3,000 ERAM missiles that Ukraine is now set to purchase from the US have a range of up to 280 miles, which may or may not coincidentally be the shortest distance from Ukrainian territory to central Moscow. The Pentagon says "Ukraine will use funding from Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway and Foreign Military Financing from the United States for this purchase", which will cost them about $850 million. ■ In a meaningful way, the expense itself is parallel with the bill racked up by the United Kingdom in the early stages of World War II: It looks like a lot on paper, but compared to the alternative it's a pittance. When you're in the middle of a fight for your very existence, you spend what you must. ■ And it's no exaggeration to call it an existential struggle: Russia keeps on attacking civilians directly in a war that it alone bears responsibility for starting and perpetuating. The speed with which Ukraine has transformed itself into a cutting-edge military force is remarkable; they've even developed a home-grown cruise missile. ■ Ukraine never should have had to do any such thing in the first place, but their commitment to self-determination has shown just how much morale and character can determine the course of war. What they deserve now is to be left alone to enjoy peace. With luck, their new weapons will bring that peaceful day significantly closer.
August 25, 2025
Why you care about an independent central bank
The biggest obstacle to a real public understanding of economics is not that the subject itself is intuitively hard. The real problem is that so many of its conclusions are relatively straightforward, but the most important ones tend to be either non-obvious or downright counterintuitive. That's because at heart, economics is a study of human behavior and human beings just don't always make sense. ■ One of those important, but non-obvious conclusions is that the best possible situation is for prices to rise (but only buy a little bit) all of the time. It's easy enough to see why prices rising too fast (high inflation) are bad things. But people tend not to realize that it can be equally bad for prices to fall for a prolonged period of time (deflation). Deflationary periods, when prices fall across-the-board for too long, cause people to decide to hold off on spending so that they can get better deals later. This causes economic contraction that can be just as painful as when prices rise too fast. ■ Individually, it's hard not to like the feeling of falling prices. But spread across the scale of a population, the phenomenon becomes a huge problem. It isn't obvious that low and predictable inflation is the ideal condition, but that's one of the key assignments given to the Federal Reserve Board. ■ The Federal Reserve is charged with aiming for prices to rise gently and predictably. This leaves people best off across the board because it preserves most of the savings that they keep from year to year while very gently encouraging people to spend rather than hoard their cash. ■ Finding the Goldilocks number for inflation (not too much, not too little) and sticking to it is an incredibly difficult task. It's difficult not just in mathematical terms, but also in social science terms. Not everyone has the same incentives to cheer for the same amount of inflation at the same time. Retirees, for instance, typically want inflation to remain very low, while companies with heavy debt burdens might like a lot more. ■ That's what makes central bank independence utterly vital to an advanced economy. It's not that a central bank should be completely ignorant of politics (after all, it is acting on the most consequential of the social sciences), but there needs to be sufficient independence that the people in charge of managing the money supply are free to act without fear that they will be persecuted or punished for doing the right thing when it requires going against prevailing public opinion. ■ Again, it is not intuitively obvious that the smartest thing a government can do about inflation is to stay out of the question and leave it to professionals who are outside of their reach. But that is the right conclusion. The more credible the case that a government will leave the central bankers alone, the more confidence people can have not only in that government, but also in the money supply of that country. ■ Confidence is hugely valuable to those who have earned it -- it's expensive to procure and requires self-discipline to maintain. Once you have it, the stupidest possible decision is to fritter it away.
August 24, 2025
Musicians have long copied, mimicked, and reinterpreted the work of other performers. Someone develops a new style, and someone else tries to woodshed it until they land the technique. Someone writes a phenomenal song, and others cover it in their own ways. The Beatles land in America and a TV producer comes up with The Monkees. ■ But it's a long way from human imitation -- inevitably imperfect and often a mark of admiration -- to open impersonation. The latter is a problem online, where fake albums are surprising the real artists credited with making them. ■ There's probably something a little flattering about the knowledge that anyone would go to the effort to train AI on your work, but the flattery is probably outweighed by the insult of the scam. The word "authenticity" pops up quite a bit when people talk about computer-generated music: It can be adequate, in the same way that unremarkable instrumental music can be passable in a hotel lobby. ■ It seems that many of the fakes are after low-stakes ripoffs; they are not (at least yet) after the big artists with much success. The cost of protecting one's image might be reasonable only for those who already have lawyers on staff.
August 23, 2025
All's fair in love, war, and late night
In an interview with Marc Summers (the same person who once hosted "Double Dare"), Jay Leno claimed that his secret weapon in succeeding Johnny Carson as host of the "Tonight Show" was his willingness to act as a guest host for a fraction of the price that other guest hosts wanted to charge. ■ There are plenty of legitimate criticisms to offer about Leno: His handling of the transition to Conan O'Brien's time in the seat is almost impossible to defend with a straight face. And his treatment of Monica Lewinsky as a punch line (rather than as a young person who was involved in an office affair that had a pretty clear aggressor at fault) probably crossed the line into public bullying. Yet other criticisms are entirely fair play. ■ But he probably doesn't deserve to be skewered for his approach to landing the "Tonight Show" gig in the first place. Some weird things happen when an attractive opportunity emerges that has a monopsony structure. In a monopsony, there's only one buyer (in this case, NBC). There was no "also-ran" opportunity chasing after the "Tonight Show": Carson made it not just an 800-lb. gorilla, but really the only game in town. ■ And when there's only one buyer, prospective sellers -- in this case, Leno and his fellow guest hosts -- may be entirely rational if they choose to do just about anything to land the gig, including working for absurdly low rates. Land the contract, prove your value, and raise your prices later. That wouldn't excuse doing something illegal or immoral to anyone else to get the job, but within the bounds of law and decency, almost anything else is fair play.
August 22, 2025
Politico has published a story with a peculiar headline: "US to take part in Russia's answer to Eurovision". Eurovision, of course, is the enormously popular musical contest based in Europe, and the Russian contest in question is Intervision, a Eurovision knockoff put on by the Russian government. ■ Russia was kicked out of Eurovision in 2022 over its invasion of Ukraine. The rival state-run contest is Russia's attempt to legitimize its own cultural standing in the world. ■ Any decent American should be ashamed of taking part in a knockoff contest under such a terrible cloud. It's not like the Russian contest existed prior to the war of aggression against Ukraine; it's a consequence of the war, and anybody taking part should be ashamed to bring it any reputational standing. ■ It's also important to ask, "Under whose authority is an American being sent?" When Politico says, "The United States is taking part", do they mean that the State Department is sending the singer, or that it is more like a self-appointed committee of five people exercising terrible judgment? ■ It's a bad look either way, whether any official activity is involved or not. But it's doubtful that there's anything official going on. What agency or department would even pick a representative? And the reporting should be clearer about that before saying "The United States" is doing anything. ■ Don't lend credibility to the non-credible. If the Russian government wants to carry out a second-rate singing contest, that's one thing. Even NBC can do that, and it doesn't have any state power behind it. ■ But if an activity is plainly not worth legitimizing -- like an attempt to rehabilitate the cultural image of a country bent on conquest through means like 80 attacks on maternity units in hospitals -- then reporting should be clear about the remainder of the world contributes to that credibility. ■ Are there official acts involved? If so, how high do they go? Has a low-level bureaucratic functionary somewhere rubber-stamped a bad idea, or is the Secretary of State trying to send a message? These distinctions matter. In a case like this, no engagement is a good idea, but the private acts of weak citizens are very different from decrees from the White House.
August 20, 2025
A well-seasoned expression says, "If you want to travel fast, go alone. If you want to travel far, go together." There are times for going fast, but there are many more times when it's worth going far. One of those times was when Ukraine's president traveled with seven other European leaders to meet with (and attempt to persuade) the President of the United States that his country is worth a modest investment of solidarity in its fight to repel a Russian invasion. ■ The whole of human civilization lost out in a big way when Russia, emerging from the wreckage of the Soviet Union, failed to achieve the necessary escape velocity from decades of Communist oppression to emerge as a true, liberty-based democracy. There was a window of opportunity -- and other countries with the same Communist baggage, fewer natural resources, and less technological progress at their disposal managed to make it through. ■ Russia did not, and though the Russian people suffer most directly from that failure, others have suffered, too: Prominently, the people of Georgia, Belarus, and of course, Ukraine. In a better alternate history, a reconstructed Russia is contributing peacefully and mightily to the world's scientific, cultural, and economic progress, much as post-war West Germany and Japan or post-occupation South Korea or France do in our real world. ■ Societal openness and individual freedom work like that: They generate desirable progress domestically, but that progress spills over into good things for other nations, too. It's a matter of traveling far by traveling together. ■ Ukraine deserves every reasonable chance to win its present military conflict. Europe seems alert to the fact such a victory would be important to its security, too, which is why France, Germany, the UK, Italy, and Finland sent their leaders along on the urgent mission. Going together matters. ■ And in the long run, the world needs to remember to promptly offer every encouragement whenever a country shows signs of turning away from a sinister system of government and giving liberal democracy a try. It won't always result in success. Reforms don't always stick and culture doesn't always grow. But as we have seen, the costs of failure are enormous.
August 17, 2025
If both death and taxes are inevitable, then it's unsurprising that talk about imposing taxes upon death should also be periodically unavoidable, too. That's currently the case for the UK, where talk of invigorating the country's inheritance tax system is running hot. The Guardian has editorialized, "There is a powerful argument for intergenerational fairness in a society where inheritance, especially of property, dictates life chances, dividing ever younger cohorts into landowner and tenant classes. Taxing inheritance is a modest but necessary levelling mechanism." ■ Such arguments seem to survive in almost copy-and-paste format from every inheritance tax debate cycle to the next. Sure, it's a "powerful" argument, but that doesn't make it persuasive. ■ There will always be some intuitive appeal to the claim that it's unfair for some people to gain a financial advantage over others just because they landed in the lucky end of the gene pool. Yet there's also a widespread intuitive understanding that some people just have better luck than others, and almost everyone is either happy to have it or jealous of those who do. ■ People also tend to realize that the greater the emphasis on activating government power to control choices about what people can pass on after death, the greater the amount of scheming that will result to avoid the penalties of taxation. It's a make-work program for accountants and estate attorneys. ■ Moreover, two of the great asset classes (real estate and private businesses) are also the hardest to piece out so that tax can be paid. It's hard enough to divide a quantity of farmland among individual heirs or to split up a family-run construction business without also accounting for selling off a portion of the operation to satisfy the tax collector. ■ The difficulty inherent to division, especially when combined with a meaningful inheritance tax burden, only serves to subsidize more impersonal structures of ownership, like REITs and publicly traded corporations. Things divided up into millions of small shares are naturally easier to liquidate to pay some taxes than heavy equipment or apartment buildings or privately-held patents. ■ It's important to stop and ask whether a policy is really enhancing desirable social consequences or merely replacing one undesirable outcome with another. It's not always the case that a family-owned farm or business enterprise is better for the community than one that is publicly traded, but fairly often it is. Britain is welcome to make its own choices regarding inheritance taxation, but it would be unwise to ignore the secondary effects of policy choices.
August 16, 2025
Left to their own devices, AI bots form terrible social networks
A big computing experiment at the University of Amsterdam attempted to test a fascinating premise: How would a big population of artificial-intelligence bots respond to being unleashed on a social network -- not to create spam, as so many bots do, but left simply to interact with one another? The researchers set up a social network, walled off exclusively for the bots, and let them loose. ■ According to their pre-publication draft, the researchers observed the bots "spontaneously form homogeneous communities, with follower ties heavily skewed toward co-partisanship" and end up with "a highly unequal distribution of visibility and influence" (that is, they develop high-status "influencers"). ■ It sounds familiar in all of the worst ways. So far, those are the same consequences widely seen within online social networks populated by humans. Spontaneous community creation is just fine -- maybe even a sign of healthy interaction -- but the skew towards partisanship isn't. And the surely there's something upside-down about things that aren't even self-aware still seeking social status. ■ There's something else, though, that should stand out: Humans can recognize that these outcomes are suboptimal. Not only that, we can choose to opt out of unhealthy networks. And we can choose to create humane rules for old or new networks to make them more pro-social, if we choose. ■ A network could, for instance, require users to post one compliment a day. Or to submit to a mutual rating system for positivity or sociability. Or to post updates subject to strict rate-limiting in times of flame wars. (That last one isn't anything new -- message board and listserv administrators have been using the technique for decades.) ■ What's interesting is that those solutions are evident to humans (even if our most prominent social networks utterly fail to put them into use), but they seem not to have occurred to these chatbots. We can be faulted for making poor choices about trade-offs...but why should we trust emerging technologies that don't even self-impose thoroughly rational rules for self-betterment?
August 14, 2025
A recurring theme within Internet discourse is "People getting angry over the minor jokes and small joys of others". The alert viewer can find examples all the time. The anger quite often (perhaps preponderantly) comes from individuals who identify quite vocally to the left of center and who are quick to take an almost Puritanical offense at even small deviations from their sense of orthodoxy. ■ Cooper Lund highlights an example of this condition from someone denigrating another person's rather anodyne observation that it's perfectly fine to go out and enjoy living, shopping, and dining among other people within a community. Lund notes: "There's a lot of people on the left who have substituted their version of communism for puritanical religion and then wonder why more people don't agree with them." ■ The famous line from "Glengarry Glen Ross", "ABC [...] Always Be Closing", gets morphed by some into "ABS: Always Be Scolding". And it's not a good look. The semi-professional scolds need to be reminded periodically that it's quite OK to take "the pursuit of happiness" at face value. ■ It is perfectly sensible to acknowledge that the world is a mix of both good and bad experiences, and that there are many mild and gentle joys worth celebrating (sometimes even in public), even in times that contain big challenges. Happiness itself is a good thing -- so good, it merited an express acknowledgment in the Declaration of Independence. Individually, we should seek happiness, and we should be pleased to see others seeking it for themselves.
The corporate vice president in charge of Windows products at Microsoft has made an appearance on a company video channel speculating enthusiastically about a near-term future in which Windows emphasizes "multimodality" -- stretching users beyond the conventional keyboard and mouse. A considerable portion of this, it appears, drives toward voice-driven computing. ■ Putting aside the many "Star Trek" references the concept conjures up, this kind of promotional enthusiasm tells us something important. It says that we've gotten technological development way out ahead of cognitive science. And that's problematic. ■ Really nobody who knows how human learning and reasoning actually work would say, "Gee whiz, let's fill open-floor-plan offices full of people making constant noise! It'll be great for productivity!" ■ Your brain works differently when it's composing sentences (or sentence fragments) with pen and paper, versus with a keyboard and a screen, versus in regular human conversation, versus being spoken into a machine with live feedback. These are different pathways and the differences affect the outcomes. ■ The same goes for receiving and processing information: What you read on a screen, read on a printed sheet of paper, hear in conversation, hear in a lecture, or listen to a machine read back to you all go through different cognitive mechanisms. (The screen inferiority effect is real!) Attention, comprehension, and recall are all affected by the mode of input. ■ Microsoft has an institutional imperative to deploy new technologies and to make them look like they will magically make office productivity sizzle. But it's important for the rest of us to take a step back and ask whether much-heralded changes really are for the better. ■ The paperless office was a myth, and for good reason: A lot of documents are better off being stored and transmitted electronically, but many (if not most) people still perform better when they read a written page. We need to carry the same awareness that not all modes of interaction are equally good into the imagined workplaces of the future. Just because technology can do something doesn't mean it's better for our brains that way.
August 13, 2025
Don't just look for the gas -- check for the brakes
Two grown adults are engaged in the online version of a slap fight, as Elon Musk and Sam Altman exchange barbs and screenshots of their AI chatbots accusing one another of disreputability. Beyond their self-evident personal animosity, it reflects the high intensity of the ongoing "gold rush" phase of artificial intelligence development. Lots of people are heavily invested in making truly extraordinary predictions and promises at a time when capital expenditures in the sector are large enough to meaningfully affect GDP growth rates. ■ Big business has always attracted big personalities, of course. We aren't soon to forget the names of JP Morgan or Henry Ford. But there's a note of caution that applied then, and it applies now, when it comes to promoters -- both the people at the center of the action and their many cheerleaders and partisans. ■ Zealotry is often the red flag waved by the uninformed. Increasing knowledge of any subject area -- be it technology, religion, economics, medicine, or any other -- should tend to increase one's humility about the boundaries of what is possible, prudent, or wise to do. ■ That humility doesn't necessarily mean that one's enthusiasm should diminish, only that one should have an increasing awareness of limitations and potential hazards in at least roughly equal measure with awareness of the possibilities. A beginning driver may see a car and think only of its potential for speed. The experienced driver can appreciate the speed, but should be able to look at the same car and wonder equally about its brakes. ■ The really prominent individuals in this field probably know more about the limitations than they're willing to let on -- though it's also possible they have become so entranced by the vista they've painted that they no longer see the limitations as they should. So it may go with the hype cycle.
August 11, 2025
Relgious freedom between secular states
Shared with endorsement: "Authoritarian regimes don't just politicize religion: they reconstruct it to consolidate power, recognizing that spiritual legitimacy shapes identity, loyalty, and meaning [...] Today's 'managed spirituality' is not a relic, but a deliberate, strategic tool of control. Liberal democracies must confront this with imagination."
August 10, 2025
Poland and Norway to team up on drone defense systems
To get most directly from Poland to Norway, one would have to cross the territories of Denmark and/or Sweden, and possibly Germany as well. Their geographic separation is being overcome by a plan to cooperatively develop a system for Counter-Unmanned Aerial Systems (C-UAS). One company from each country will enter the planned partnership. ■ Notably, though they are not next-door neighbors, both countries border Russia, which has been aggressively weaponizing drones (UAS) against Ukraine. It doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to see whose behavior may be instigating these kinds of partnerships. ■ The supposed plans for a meeting in Alaska between the presidents of Russia and the United States should have a lot of the world taking notice. Will an unwilling Ukraine be forced into compromises it wasn't invited to discuss? Reasonable minds can hope not, but there's reason to believe that such a worry isn't misplaced. The very thought that outside forces may decide what happens to a country like Ukraine should keep people awake at night. ■ That ought to be alarming for Europe generally. Even if things go entirely Ukraine's way (which is unlikely), the countries that could easily be in the way of future Russian territorial hunger pangs should act as though trouble is somewhere on a spectrum from "not unlikely" to "nearly inevitable". The time has never been more ripe for getting cross-border cooperation underway to make for stronger European-grown defensive technologies.
August 9, 2025
A pseudonymous account on Twitter recently had a viral moment with an observation that for all of the people who claim (groundlessly) that "I wasn't meant for Excel spreadsheets. I was meant to fight in Caesar's legions", the appropriate response is that "the Romans would have gone nuts for Excel". It's clever and undoubtedly true. ■ First, true on the face of it: Imagine how happy we in the modern age were by the transition from slide rules to pocket calculators to spreadsheets. It's been a wild ride, and it would seem all the more incredible to someone who had only known a world in which paper itself was scarce. ■ But it's even more important to see what having Excel would have actually meant: A truly incomparable strategic advantage. As Ned Resnikoff noted, "The Roman Empire was first and foremost a trade and logistics network." And as important as it has always been to have good battle planning in war, it's at least equally important to have logistics figured out. ■ No army ever won without figuring out a supply chain. Some have figured it out by plundering what they encountered along the way, but even the legendarily destructive and genocidal Mongols under Genghis Khan still faced resource constraints like having enough grass for horses to graze. ■ Dwight Eisenhower noted in his reflections on World War II that his Russian counterparts "suggested that of all the spectacular feats of the war, even including their own, the Allied success in the supply of the pursuit across France would go down in history as the most astonishing." ■ Empires and victorious armies are really just vast logistical networks, right beneath the surface. Being able to see that -- to see the underlying systems, rather than just the thing that's evident on the surface -- is one of the most valuable skills in the modern world. It would have been powerful in ancient times, too, and there's no reason to believe that it won't still be an advantage to people living two thousand years from now.
August 6, 2025
The trouble with student evaluations
The biggest problem with student evaluations of their teachers isn't the room it opens up for mischief, even though that problem is quite significant, particularly as course evaluations become a prospective tool for government intervention at colleges and universities. That problem is emergent and well worth ongoing attention. But even in a world where every evaluation were submitted (and reviewed) entirely in good faith, the bigger problem is that students are almost by definition inadequately equipped to gauge what they're evaluating. ■ You don't know on the last day of class how much you will retain nor how well this instructor compares to one you didn't have, teaching the same course but in a different way. You can't know these things as a student on the final day of class -- unless, perhaps, you're taking the same class for the second time because you failed the first, in which case there's a decidedly strong conflict of interest. ■ The meaningful outcomes of a course -- from pre-kindergarten all the way through graduate school -- may remain unknown for a decade or more to come. A well-honed ability to compare and contrast teaching quality is unlikely to develop materially along the way. ■ If teacher evaluations have a meaningful impact on things like tenure or pay, then the whole thing sets up a terrible incentive structure, rewarding whatever impresses students in the short term rather than what improves their outcomes for the long term. This is one of the reasons why performance pay for teachers is such a difficult topic: In a truly rational world, teachers should be incentivized to do what optimizes outcomes for their students many years into the future. ■ That doesn't mean students shouldn't be asked for evaluations -- especially open-ended ones. But evaluations constructed with badly-chosen metrics and performed by ill-equipped evaluators can't help but cause bad outcomes. Signs are pointing to their increasing use, so it's prudent to pay attention now.
August 4, 2025
If you want a quotation to be remembered, misattribute it to someone famous. Winston Churchill "said" lots of things he didn't really say. Albert Einstein, too. And almost nobody has more misattributions than Abraham Lincoln, whose gift for language and exceptional place in history combine to make him a particularly good "source" for many a memorable bon mot. ■ One of those misattributions is "If I had five minutes to chop down a tree, I'd spend the first three sharpening my axe." It's a terrific proverb, really, even if Lincoln didn't say it. And it's particularly timely at the moment. ■ Conor Sen, an opinion columnist at Bloomberg, ignited a mild online controversy by declaring, "My gut feeling is that parents trying to make their kids elite at reading and writing as a backlash against our screen/video world are like teaching their kids the Dewey decimal system, microfiche, driving a stick shift." He added: "There's not going to be much interesting written content post-2020's." ■ Sometimes people are merely stirring the pot, especially online. But the comments seem to have been taken in earnest by others, and Sen himself has defended the take. ■ Putting aside what Sen intended by "elite at reading and writing" (probably a reference to a recent "sign of the times" article in a high-status publication), reading and writing generally are probably the best examples of "axe-sharpening" life skills that anyone can develop. They prepare the way for practically all other worthwhile endeavors. It's not a matter of elite behavior; in fact, it's quite the opposite. ■ The skills of literacy are valued most by those to whom they are denied. When Booker T. Washington tells in his autobiography how "From the time that I can remember having any thoughts about anything, I recall that I had an intense longing to learn to read", he conveys a desire that wouldn't have been different, even if he had lived in a "screen/video world". ■ Much can be conveyed by the routes of oral transmission (video, music, speech, radio, or tales told around the campfire). But nothing in thousands of years of human civilization has exceeded the capacity of the well-written (and usually carefully-edited) written word to convey knowledge, meaning, and depth. ■ The cultural pendulum has swung far in the direction of the oral formats for now, but it's an episodic event, not a permanent change. Even barbarians ultimately come to regret that something is missing. Either things begin to fall apart at the societal level or, individually, they respond to the very same innate spark that animated Booker T. Washington to know that his early illiteracy deprived him of something he wanted very much. Human nature is curious. Plenty more remains to be both read and written.
August 3, 2025
An AI do-and-don't list for teachers - part 1
The school year typically begins in earnest in mid-August, and one of the hot topics for teachers this school year will be the reach of artificial intelligence tools both inside and outside the classroom. As with every other new piece of educational technology, there are good ways and bad ways to put it to use. Some recommendations follow. ■ DON'T tell students that artificial intelligence will replace the jobs they want. Technological change always causes changes to the labor force, but very few jobs are eliminated entirely. Telling young people their hoped-for careers will be replaced is discouraging -- and even labor economists rarely dare to predict the future with that much certainty. ■ DO tell students to look for opportunities to maximize the gap between what they have to give up to have a career and what they get back in reward. Encourage them to think about the path to a "dream job" as a series of opportunities that require trade-offs, like spending time in college, climbing a seniority ladder, or sacrificing other opportunities. On the other side, people are rewarded with more than just money: Social approval, work-life balance, respect, and many other factors are involved. The difference between what you get and what you give up to get it is what matters. ■ DON'T vilify all artificial intelligence tools equally. As with every technology, there are good and bad uses, which depend on the character of the user. (Even a kitchen knife can be used to lovingly prepare a meal or to commit cold-blooded murder.) ■ DO explain the limits of the usefulness of all technological tools, using real terms. Machine learning has the potential to do extraordinary things when large volumes of data are involved, as in medical research. But it also has the capacity to create terrible pain to real people when it's used to do truly ghoulish things like generating spammy obituaries. ■ DON'T promote unquestioning faith in the answers generated by artificial intelligence tools. Just because Google and other high-profile services are nudging people to use their AI tools doesn't make them more trustworthy or credible. It only means they're potentially profitable. ■ DO show students how to incorporate AI-generated content into a careful search process, including how to cross-reference among sources and how to independently verify what is often served with great authority. Show examples of dangerous and stupid errors that can and should be checked by humans, like obvious biographical and historical errors, scientific mistakes, or falsified reporting.
August 1, 2025
One source: To discover quite by accident something you didn't know you wanted to know. It's a delightful gift to stumble into learning something new without having sought it. But you have to practice being open to surprise and wonder, or else it won't happen.
July 31, 2025
Ode to the dictionary in an unfashionable age
Of all the forms of educational technology that have ever been introduced, from the pencil to the chalkboard to the personal computer, perhaps the most elegant is the humble desktop dictionary. Think of its many magnificent features. ■ The dictionary is effectively self-contained: Starting from the knowledge of only a few basic words, a child can construct the meanings of all other words by building from one entry to another. ■ It manages to be comprehensive and yet compact at the same time. And from the knowledge contained in a dictionary, effectively all other learning can be developed with enough access to the right books. Imagine what historians would give just to have a thorough dictionary of certain dead and lost languages. ■ A good dictionary manages to avoid circular references while introducing background information of great value, like word origins, historical uses, and designated correct pronunciations. ■ The only real flaw to the dictionary is the inescapable fact that a person can't look for a word with certainty without knowing how it is spelled, though the navigational clues within the dictionary can help. ■ The other thing the dictionary offers is serendipity. Words being listed alphabetically don't necessarily have anything to do with one another, but an adjacent word to the one the reader is searching may, in fact, open up a brand-new door to something entirely worth knowing. That may not always be the case, but there is a certain joy to be found in encountering something new and satisfying. ■ Tools like dictionaries are indispensable, even when they seem to be out of favor. We shouldn't assume that schoolkids are learning how to use the paper dictionary, when spell check and online dictionaries are readily available on their school-issued tablets and laptops. ■ But the habits and practices of their use need to be handed down, especially when companies as reputable as Microsoft are turning over their grammar checks to artificial intelligence while others, like Grammarly, are touting their tools to take over writing altogether. We are sailing mostly unwittingly into dangerous waters, and history is witness that enough other arts have been lost to time. Save the language and make a child look up what Webster's has to say.
A shipbuilding revival at great cost
South Korea has reportedly committed to a $150 billion "investment" in American shipbuilding capacity, using the know-how of its strong existing shipbuilding industry. The country is trying to win favor with the White House in an attempt to avoid getting hit with high and capricious tariff rates. Supposedly, the President still intends to hit the country with a 15% import tax, which seems imprudent for a country that is a good ally and a useful trading partner in a strategic geopolitical location.
Science has been pretty convinced that there's a bunch of matter in the Universe that we haven't been able to locate. A research project by Caltech and Harvard found it, and "revealed that 76 percent of the universe's normal matter lies in the space between galaxies, also known as the intergalactic medium. About 15 percent resides in galaxy halos, and the remainder is concentrated within galaxies -- in stars or in cold galactic gas."
"Sloppers" will come to regret outsourcing their thoughts
It has been suggested that "power users" of chatbots like ChatGPT should be called "sloppers", since they open themselves up to mentally swallowing the vast amounts of "AI slop" being produced by those tools. It's a very good word.
During the peak of network television dominance -- just before cable came along to ensure that there would always be at least 57 channels and nothing on -- individual scripts may not have been entirely predictable, but there was never much doubt about the direction that any individual episode might take. Problems would be solved, crises would be overcome, bad guys would be caught. The only reason it took so many months to figure out who shot J.R. Ewing was that real-world people were arguing over money. Scripts usually came across with the subtlety of an after-school special. ■ Fast-forward to the present, and it's no longer possible even to precisely quantify the number of channels available to the television viewer. Streaming especially has obliterated the old strategies. That chaos has resulted in much the opposite problem: Scripts are being written with binge-watching in mind and the specter of the second screen ever present. ■ In the realm of prestige television, an overcorrection can be seen in scripts becoming increasingly inferential -- sequential episodes skipping vital plot points in between that only make sense once the viewer attends to the context clues. "Arrested Development" did it for fun, with false promises at the end of each episode about what would happen "On the next 'Arrested Development'". ■ But serious television often now omits a lot. And though it can be hard to look away because the conflicts are so compelling, the shots so beautiful, and the actors so skilled, there's also something jarring about how screenwriting seems to have invited itself to skip a lot of details along the way to dropping heavy dramatic changes at the end of a season. Thus, viewers can find themselves drawn in by the screen presence of gifted actors on a show like "The Bear" but still reaching the end of a season and wondering why they hadn't been told any of the secrets sometime sooner. ■ Human storytelling doesn't always have to keep an explicit lesson in mind, but there's at least a little danger in surrendering so much of a story's energy to atmospherics, no matter how good they are. It's not that every scene needs to be worthy of a "The More You Know" comet trail, but audiences do deserve to know a little more about themselves at the end of a commitment to a program. High-prestige shows like "Mad Men", "Game of Thrones", and "The Sopranos" all managed to frustrate many of their fans with terminal ambiguity. Some people like to have things to wonder about after a show has finished its run, but few shows have the honesty to admit that, like "Curb Your Enthusiasm", their goal is to leave with "no lessons learned".
July 30, 2025
An American banking executive from Wells Fargo has been told she can't leave China because of a shadowy "criminal" investigation. What is the case about? What is the purported "involvement"? These things seem to remain unknown -- which doesn't necessarily make them untrue or pretextual, but it definitely doesn't serve to alleviate concerns that they are. ■ The Economist published a compelling podcast on China's use of arbitrary imprisonment as a tool of intimidation against foreigners. Much injustice can be done under the false flag of "the law", and there's a plainly evident track record to that effect in China. ■ Wells Fargo has suspended all employee travel to China as a result of the ongoing incident, a decision which seems utterly belated. Under current conditions, it's hard to see what rewards are great enough for any American whose background or profile could raise any attention at all to be motivated to go to China for the foreseeable future. ■ What could be worth the non-zero risk of being used as a game piece and facing a thousand days in a Communist prison? The reputational damage deserves to last for a generation. In this conflict, there is a lesson for America, China, and the rest of the world: You can't be rich all alone, and you can't have the protection of rules all alone, either. ■ Both conditions are dependent upon sharing with others. They simply aren't durable without the consent and the participation of others, and to the extent that anybody tries to keep them to themselves, they risk losing them altogether. ■ Adversarial relationships -- like those that require beating up on rivals in order to get rich, or that depend upon flexing dubious "legal" authority to put others in their place -- are inherently unstable and unsustainable. They can rack up short-term victories, but they can't achieve lasting success. Constructive cooperation doesn't afford a lot of opportunities to feel like a victor in combat, but it's the only way to really reap the benefits of strength.
Common-sense rules that really could stop about half of headline news stories before they happen: 1. Read the fine print 2. Read between the lines 3. Read the manual
July 29, 2025
Computers don't understand time
Cambridge University has unveiled the results of a remarkable project to catalog and digitally archive a large collection of medieval medical manuscripts. It's a fascinating undertaking, compiling 8,000 recipes for supposed cures from 186 different texts. Much of the text is unintelligible to the modern reader and speaker of English, but some transcripts are available. ■ Beyond the pure curiosity factor, it is a fascinating project because it reveals something important about human nature that distinguishes us (we, of "organic" intelligence, as opposed to the artificial type) from the many computers upon which we have come to rely so thoroughly in our modern age. The central matter is this: A computer doesn't understand time. Nor does it recognize changes over time as having value. And there's little reason to believe that digital computing machines ever will. They can measure the passage of time, of course, and they can be programmed to indicate time as a meaningful variable. Even a microwave oven can do that. ■ But when it comes to finding answers, the very nature of binary programming is that there is either a current answer or not. And if an answer is old, it is no longer the answer, and is probably to be discarded. That's adequate if a person is asking Google "Is there a tsunami warning in effect for Honolulu right now?". ■ What makes us distinct from the machines we build -- even the large language models and "machine learning" products we can design -- is that human beings can recognize the change in knowledge and understanding over time, and can hold conflicting, expired, or misleading information in mind when arriving at conclusions. ■ Decisions that were made by medieval practitioners of medicine (or perhaps it would be more accurate to call them "healing arts", since there was little of what we know as "science" involved) were often radically different from those made today, but those changes themselves have value. What led, for example, from mystical claptrap about "humours" to immunotherapy today? ■ Knowledge took a path from the past into the present, and choices that are objectively wrong today may have been conditionally right in the past. Likewise, the "right" answer to a question can easily change depending on whether we're asking a kindergartener, a high school sophomore, or a Ph.D. candidate -- what you learn as a child may be subjectively or conditionally right for what you can comprehend at the time, even setting the stage for you to be objectively accurate later on. There are more than seven colors of the rainbow, but that doesn't make a child wrong when they recite the words behind "Roy G. Biv". A stage of knowledge may be important to get right, even if it will later be judged wrong. ■ It's important for the purposes of human judgment to understand what changed and why over a time period, and that's something you can only do if you have an organic understanding of time. There's little reason to believe that any digital machine ever will. That doesn't mean we should negate their use -- but it does mean we should develop a nuanced understanding of the theory of knowledge itself before making ourselves dependent upon the choices of any device that has never felt the pressure of a timed test or daydreamed while staring idly into space.
Tsunami warning for the Pacific
Hawaii and other locations could see it
(Video) Some gentle bubbling over Des Moines
July 28, 2025
Marcus Hutchins: "Being in tech and having a single modicum of critical thinking is just screaming 'this isn't what LLMs are designed for' over and over as people shove a bunch of word predictors into critical decision making processes because some glorified used car salesmen told them it would fix all their problems". ■ If you invent a tool that actually increases productivity, you're doing some good...if and only if it does so at lower cost than what it replaces. ■ If you invent a tool that pretends to increase productivity but turns everything into ham salad, then you should probably stop over-promising.
Winds of 60 to 90 mph are being tracked in storms across northern Iowa. That's low-grade tornado speed, but spread across a wide area.
July 27, 2025
A huge step forward against HIV
The FDA has approved a twice-a-year treatment to prevent HIV -- a shot that showed spectacular results in preventing HIV among test populations. The European Medicine Agency has seconded the approval, which should lead to full EU approval by the end of the year. That it works is scientifically wonderful. That it only requires two injections a year is really a bonanza for public health: As with any infectious disease, the fewer the obstacles to prevention compliance, the better. And drug-maker Gilead is promising efforts to make it widely affordable.
There's an old adage that if there's a gold rush underway, you don't want to be a prospector -- you want to be the one selling shovels. There's a modern-day angle to that perspective: In the midst of yet another technology boom (this time, concentrated on spending related to artificial intelligence), you don't want to be chasing the tech prize: It's far smarter to get in on the real estate game. ■ Geographically, the San Francisco Bay Area starts out with some tough constraints: Mountains, water, and a tightly-bound traffic system, just to name a few. But there are also some serious artificial constraints on real estate, like San Francisco's notoriously restrictive rules on zoning and housing codes. ■ Things are slow to change, even if the problems are widely evident. A report from San Jose State University claims that "the amount a household needs to make to buy a house in the San Jose metro area is $468,252". Median rent is only "affordable" for a household making $136,532 a year (assuming that a maximum of 30% of income should be spent on housing). It becomes clear from figures like those that big Silicon Valley salaries are being funneled in no small part to those who own real estate in the area -- either for rent or for sale. ■ It should be no wonder that working from home appeals so much to people facing costs of such a magnitude. What good is a high income if it's just a pass-through to a mortgage banker or landlord? And circumstances like high real-estate costs spill over to everyone else in a community, which can instigate an upward spiral of costs as everyone tries simply to keep up -- and those who benefit from the peculiarities of the market work hard to entrench the conditions that inflate their wealth. Anytime concentrated benefits conflict with diffuse costs, the safe bet is on the side with the concentrated benefits.
Discovered: The "Law and Order" theme song line dance
(Video) Someone could write an entire feature film script about how this came into being, and it would be a better story than 90% of what Hollywood normally greenlights.
July 26, 2025
In theory, Tesla has unintentionally solved homelessness in America: With the advent of full self-driving mode, a person could soon plausibly sleep behind the wheel of a moving vehicle without a hazard to self or others. Such is America's cultural commitment to freedom of movement (particularly by roads) that we never challenge anyone over the mere fact of traveling from place to place, and we commit seemingly endless public funds to furnishing the pavement upon which vehicles may freely travel. ■ Thus, once "self-driving" no longer requires driver supervision, anyone with a fully self-driving vehicle could, in theory, get a sheltered night's sleep while driving aimlessly about the streets of a community, even if they could not afford permanent shelter where they wanted to be. ■ This argument is, of course, an exercise in stretching a question to logical absurdity. It does, however, highlight a serious conflict in public policy: We provide almost lavishly for people to be in motion, but we often adopt a conflicting mess of barriers to maximizing the supply of places for people to be (literally and figuratively) at rest. ■ Perhaps the most extreme demonstration of that imbalance is the fact that the construction of the Interstate Highway System alone probably displaced about a million people from their established homes. People in motion were given priority; people at rest were literally forced to make way. ■ With "homelessness" writ large thrusting itself to the front pages of the news, it's worth a reminder that people find themselves without shelter for all kinds of reasons, some self-imposed, some by external circumstances, and others by a combination of the two. ■ But we won't get very far in the effort to alleviate their problems without seeing that secure, dignified housing is a continuum -- some have a lot of it, some have none, and others have less than they want. Finding ways to produce a lot of it benefits practically everyone (though it would benefit even more in practical terms if we could decouple home prices from the accumulation of household wealth). Nor will we do ourselves any good if we ignore the inconsistency between how we treat the very same people through public policies, depending on whether they are in motion or not.
July 25, 2025
In February 1947, George C. Marshall was the newly-confirmed Secretary of State. Having served as Chief of Staff of the Army for the duration of World War II, Marshall had already done incomparable service to the cause of preserving the free world. ■ Marshall was entitled to a peaceful retirement, but he continued to serve his country by taking the role of the nation's chief diplomat. Only a few weeks into his role, he delivered an address at Princeton University. Having seen war brought to a righteous end, Marshall remained gravely worried about the future. ■ "You should fully understand the special position that the United States now occupies in the world, geographically, financially, militarily, and scientifically, and the implications involved," he said. "The development of a sense of responsibility for world order and security, the development of a sense of overwhelming importance of this country's acts, and failures to act, in relation to world order and security -- these, in my opinion, are great musts for your generation." ■ Marshall, the generation of soldiers who served under him, and the European reconstruction plan that bore his name all contributed mightily to that "special position". They bought the United States nearly a century of peace. But the imperative lesson to take away from Marshall's approach is that our leadership in the world was a product of collaboration, alliances, and mutual aid -- not of dominance or exploitation. Marshall foresaw that strong friends overseas were better for America than clients or vassals. ■ "I think we seldom realize our own ignorance of what has happened in the past except by way of a chronological sequence of events with the related dates," he noted, "But the important thing is to understand the true significance, the lessons of these historical events and periods." We owe the respect to the past and the obligation to the future to be sure that we consult Marshall's time and consider how it applies today. If all we know are a few memorized names and dates, we don't really know our history at all. The lessons are just waiting there for us to learn.
July 22, 2025
Who should control screen time?
Admirably, the British government tacitly acknowledges the importance of science and technology enough to have a designated Secretary of State for Science, Innovation, and Technology -- as of now, a man named Peter Kyle. Kyle has held the job for a year, and is in the process of "looking very carefully" at the time children spend on social-media apps, promising, "I'll be making an announcement on these things in the near future". ■ By "these things", he is reported to be considering interventions like a 10:00 pm Internet curfew and a two-hour daily limit on app use for children. It is widely believed that over-use of social media is contributing to problems like sleep disruption and anxiety, and there are heartbreaking examples of gravely harmful content reaching vulnerable young people at awful times. And the rise of AI-driven chatbots presents a whole new horizon for trouble. ■ But people of goodwill ought to be reluctant -- perhaps extremely so -- to see governments act as the caretakers of children's technology use in such a nanny-state fashion as imposing curfews and mandatory time limits. New technologies almost always spark new moral panics, and moral panics tend to beget backlash. Who is more likely to uncover and share all of the loopholes around government controls: Parents or children? ■ Moreover, overwrought promises of government protection have an unpleasant way of breeding contempt for the law. At the same time, the more government promises to provide "protection" (in circumstances where it ultimately cannot deliver), the more ordinary people adopt a sense of learned helplessness and end up both disappointed and disempowered. ■ Parents and families need technological tools to help define boundaries for their children, many of which are already available but scarcely adopted. Parents need ongoing education, not only in how to manage technology at the family level, but in how to cultivate an environment to help young people take part in the real-world human engagement that everyone fears is being squeezed out by addictive tools like social media. ■ Rather than raising the stakes of a cat-and-mouse game around time spent on social media, lots of parents probably just need more and better advice about truly listening to their kids, creating attractive alternatives to mindless screen time, and opening up opportunities for the kind of face-to-face interaction with friends about which many adults reminisce fondly from their own youthful days before the Internet. ■ Childhood and adolescence have always called for thoughtful and intentional intervention by caring adults. A prudent society does much more to focus its energies on the adults closest to the developing young people, rather than trusting the interventions of government officials in faraway bureaucracies.
July 21, 2025
Since, for the most part, we no longer depend upon sports as a means to literally rehearse for combat, sports have comfortably moved into position as one of the primary means of mass entertainment in modern society. The entertainment aspect to the business has grown so large that premier professional athletes in the most-watched games rake in truly astonishing sums of money. Their elite pay, in turn, can have the effect of removing athletes from the realm of normalcy. It's hard to be down-to-earth when you're traveling with an entourage. ■ This is unfortunate, since the broad appeal of many high-profile athletes (and some coaches) gives them some of the biggest platforms to try to influence the public at large. They may not always have conventional "book learning" genius to share, but character doesn't depend on IQ. ■ Under these circumstances, it is refreshing to hear from the world's current most dominant golfer that he knows the limits of his work on the course. Addressing the press, Scottie Scheffler drew upon some of the wisdom of character when he remarked of his success, "It's fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment, but it's not fulfilling from a sense of the deepest places of your heart [...] If my golf ever started affecting my home life, or it ever affected the relationship I have with my wife or with my son, that's going to be the last day that I play out here for a living." ■ One could argue that his enormous success gives him the freedom to make a threat like that -- $91 million in winnings (and counting) is a pretty big cushion. But one could conversely argue that it's all the more laudable for Scheffler to say something like that, knowing how many people undoubtedly envy his skills and talents -- and his wealth -- and that he publicly embraces the attitude that his family life is worth even more than $91 million.
NPR asks its audience for "the books you read during high school that helped shape who you are today". ■ Nearly every American high schooler would benefit from reading "The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin" and "Up from Slavery" by Booker T. Washington. The merits of both books are two-fold: They tell necessary stories about our history while offering life advice that remains timely and relevant today. ■ Franklin tells the story of a young man with some extraordinary gifts who overcame early difficulties before growing into one of the country's most influential founders. Washington's story is one of the clearest depictions of the consequences of America's original sin, but it's much more transcendent than just that. His abilities were great, but his reservoir of character was even greater -- and is still worthy of emulation. For as self-made as Franklin could rightly claim to be, Washington was even moreso. ■ Franklin was intrinsically motivated to pursue greatness, and he achieved it. Washington was driven to serve others ("I began learning that those who are happiest are those who do the most for others. This lesson I have tried to carry with me ever since."). That both men were able to make vast contributions that still matter to America today speaks to the power of individual liberty, and what a person can do when both motivated and free.
July 20, 2025
US attitudes towards higher education are improving
After taking a beating for quite a while in both the political arena and the zeitgeist, American higher education is rising in its public esteem. It's still below previous highs, according to a Gallup survey, but the improvement in public confidence is both significant in size and broad-based. Gallup's review says "About three-quarters of U.S. adults agree that higher education leads to greater innovation and discovery, while 69% say it results in better jobs and career advancement for individuals", both of which are key selling points for the sector. ■ The leading concerns are fairly predictable -- political bias and high costs. And it's likely that some of the public contention over those issues during the past few years has had something of a corrective effect, which is how these things are supposed to work: Institutions of all stripes should generally be cautiously responsive to public pressure. ■ This is especially important when they are run by priesthoods, whether literally or figuratively. Academia is quite certainly a figurative priesthood, complete with entrenched hierarchies, apostolic-style succession, and even priestly robes. That priesthood should definitely act as a bulwark against radicalism in all its forms, both those introduced from within and imposed from without. But it shouldn't be an absolute monarchy, either. ■ Society invests in higher education, both directly and indirectly, because it has the expectation that colleges will produce better citizens and generate economic returns on the investment. Those institutions should be insulated from, but not insensitive to, the thermodynamics of public opinion: Like wool mittens, not welding gloves. We can be cautiously hopeful that the changing tide of public opinion reflects some harmonization of interests, because the academic world remains fundamentally important to a world of economic and individual liberties.
An overwhelmingly good guide to AI usage
Will Leitch: "If you use AI to write something for you, it is meaningless and we'd all be better off if you had never said anything in the first place." And nine other observations, generally quite right.
An interesting exploration of American aesthetics that may explain some things that start to look obvious once you pay attention to them
"Whenever you are asked if you can do a job, tell 'em, 'Certainly I can!' Then get busy and find out how to do it." - Theodore Roosevelt
July 19, 2025
160 years ago this month, a doctor was lured under false pretenses into an insane asylum, where he was effectively kidnapped by guards. The doctor died less than a month later. Aside from the theatrical allure of the incident itself, what makes the story important is the identity of the doctor. ■ He was Ignaz Semmelweis, a name basically unknown to the public today. But in his own time, he was a loud, lonely, and vigorous voice for a wildly unpopular belief: That doctors should sanitize their hands between patient interactions. Semmelweis had conclusively and empirically established that antibacterial disinfection was a necessary tool for protecting the lives of patients -- and he had done so as early as 1847. ■ His problem was that he hadn't established a satisfying explanatory theory for his evidence, and doctors didn't want to believe that they were unintentionally killing their patients. It took the further work of people like Joseph Lister and Louis Pasteur to ultimately change professional attitudes. ■ We should take the Semmelweis story seriously because it points to a frailty of thinking to which we are no more immune than the doctors of his time: People don't like to hear that their own choices are causing harm, even (and perhaps especially) harm to themselves, and many will retreat to bad practices that look popular rather than heed the evidence. ■ Yet the evidence ultimately prevails, and the bad choices are what continue to cause harm -- in Semmelweis's case, literally decades of totally needless deaths of thousands of mothers, only because the evidence was uncomfortable for the professionals to hear. In some places, his advice from 160 years ago still needs to be communicated to be believed. We should be alert to the risk that plenty of professionals -- and common people alike -- may be prone to persisting in similarly stupid and self-defeating behaviors today, just because we don't like to be told that we're causing our own troubles through bad choices.
July 18, 2025
The Congressional decision to rescind $1.1 billion in funding for public broadcasting won't have any meaningful effect on the Federal budget (we're spending more than twice that much just on interest payments every day). It will almost certainly have a serious impact on at least some public media stations, particularly those without significant sources of other funding. ■ What the incident ought to do is cause the American public to take a serious look at what we really expect from the mass media. The US doesn't have a true "national" broadcaster in the spirit of the BBC, CBC, RTE, or other examples found in most similarly wealthy countries. To an extent, that shields us from the more contentious debates that might take place if we did. Public media outlets in the US have a lot of local choice about what to air. ■ But even in the absence of a national broadcaster, the US does have a need for public-interest media -- not necessarily NPR or PBS, but some sort of outlet that seeks to fulfill needs in the public interest, like offering emergency information, covering important content that may be commercially non-viable, and ensuring that news and subjects of public significance are covered thoughtfully and in a balanced manner. ■ Maybe that doesn't need to be performed by the outlets that have heretofore done the work. But the work needs to be done, preferably by people who know how to serve that public interest. Thoughtful, engaging debate on the matter is long overdue.
July 16, 2025
Investment management firm Apollo has shared a commentary from their chief economist under the headline, "AI Bubble Today Is Bigger Than the IT Bubble in the 1990s". Considering how explosive the dot-com bubble turned out to be, that's quite the bold claim. ■ Apollo, with its emphasis on "alternative investments", might have a conflicting incentive that would encourage them to speak warily of publicly-traded stock markets. But it's also possible to have skin in the game and yet still speak the truth. ■ With technology moguls jockeying for position on wealth rankings at the quarter-trillion-dollar scale and tech firms paying to have nuclear power plants restarted just to fuel their artificial intelligence programs, the atmosphere certainly has the whiff of bubble about it. ■ But it would also be madness to predict when any such bubble (if real) might pop, because the timing and triggers behind economic events are almost never predictable. Conditions that defy rational sense can go on for maddeningly long times, and the things that can bring them to a halt often come straight out of left field. ■ The only thing reasonable people can do (other than to invest strictly in broad-based index funds) is to deliberately seek out a sensible valuation for each company based upon explainable factors and to buy shares in those companies only when the market price is at or below that sensible valuation. Such a strategy is effectively mania-proof, which means it will often keep the investor from benefiting from the hot streaks going up, but it also keeps the money largely out of harm's way when bubbles pop.
July 15, 2025
Lock your doors (and your drives)
Most people who have parked in a ramp or a lot have seen a sign warning "Hide your valuables -- Management not responsible for lost or stolen items". For most people, that means things like keys, wallets, bags, and purses. Most of us are not traveling with items much more valuable than that. ■ But then again, most of us aren't choreographers or dancers for Beyonce, one of whom had a pair of suitcases stolen from a vehicle in Atlanta a week ago. One of those suitcases contained computer hard drives with unreleased musical tracks from the artist. In theory, at least, it would be quite the haul for a burglar. ■ The incident speaks to the importance of using security codes and encryption on really sensitive data. In theory, if the heisted hard drives were secured with the kind of basic encryption readily available on any serious computing platform, then the music would remain inaccessible even to a lucky thief. ■ Having to enter a code every time one accesses a hard drive is a pain and an inconvenience, but it's also the price of knowing that data is secure -- just like Beyonce undoubtedly has bodyguards for the security of her person. For the rest of us, encrypting everything may be overkill. But good lock screen codes, long passphrases, and encryption on the most valuable (and most portable) data devices are as necessary as locking the doors to a car in a parking garage.
July 13, 2025
The American media landscape has changed dramatically over the past quarter-century or so, particularly in light of the massive deregulatory effects of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the nearly-simultaneous rise of Internet-delivered media. There are countless more outlets potentially now available (especially if one considers sources like podcasts and email newsletters to be competitive outlets), but the number of locally-owned outlets with the resources to provide around-the-clock monitoring of events has been in precipitous decline. ■ In an ideal world, every community would have access to an information source that offered live, real-time information from a credible newsgathering organization. Such an outlet would perform a true public service by ensuring that locals and travelers alike would always have a known place to tune in for critical information about events like weather emergencies without having to infer or evaluate rivals for their quality. ■ For some, public broadcasting fulfills that need. A report published under the authority of Senator Maria Cantwell says that dozens of public broadcasting outlets in disaster-prone places are potentially at risk from budget cuts. The report suggests that in some cases, no other outlet is available to provide the same kind of emergency alert function. ■ The resources required to provide a true situational awareness function are considerable. Salaries and other operational costs are significant, and the returns on that investment are uncertain at best. The changes of the last quarter-century make it even harder to perform, since ever-narrowing content feeds make it almost impossible to build mass audiences anymore. While it does not necessarily follow that the solution is to generously fund a particular type of media outlet (like public broadcasting) at taxpayer expense, we do need to seriously consider what kind of model can sustainably provide the level of service required to ensure that someone is able to sound the alarm for every community when the need arises.
July 12, 2025
It can be dangerous to read too much into any reporting on trends, since it's much too easy to extrapolate one or two examples of behavior into widespread evidence of a fad. But when evidence of a fad is compatible with things we know about human nature, then it's sensible to give it at least a fair hearing. ■ There is some reporting to suggest that some online daters are using ChatGPT to make their online flirtation more likely to get hits. It's plausible enough, given the stakes involved and the risks mot people associate with making a good impression. ■ It is entirely possible that people aren't thinking this far ahead, but it seems like it should be obvious that trying to initiate a relationship without using one's own words is a terrible act of self-sabotage. A relationship begun on false premises (like using a computer's words instead of speaking or writing honestly) should only be expected to last under extraordinary circumstances. ■ There's nothing new in searching for the right words, nor for thinking that a pretty face trained to parrot the right words would be enough. It's a story much older than George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion". But a petty impersonation of well-cultivated language isn't the same as sharing insights or creating a real connection.
July 9, 2025
Sometimes post hoc really is ergo propter hoc
One classic logical fallacy is "post hoc ergo propter hoc" -- after this, therefore because of this. It's good to be aware of the fallacy, since things often happen in sequence but not out of consequence. Sometimes you wash your car and then it rains -- meteorology taking no actual interest whatsoever in the state of your automobile. ■ But when a flagship product of a major business goes quite offensively out of all bounds of sense and good taste, the sudden departure of a chief executive officer should probably be viewed as a consequence of the event, by default. Linda Yaccarino probably wasn't pushed out of "X" (formerly known as Twitter) after its artificial-intelligence chatbot, Grok, lurched into a fascist-praising, antisemitic mode. There's an excellent chance she got fed up and quit. ■ A reasonable person probably would quit under the circumstances, given that the CEO is plainly overshadowed by the non-CEO majority owner. Elon Musk joked about the situation even before she was hired, tweeting, I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!" Not a very good job listing. ■ A reasonable person, though, might also have avoided being in a position to lead an organization with a company mouthpiece over which they have no control. As the owner has gone about touting how great and "significantly" improved the uncontrolled chatbot is, the CEO has been hostage to whatever data set was used to train it. ■ Warren Buffett once advised, "Culture has to come from the top and be consistent." That cannot be the case when company culture is being publicly shaped in the voice of unhinged hate and offensiveness. No rational person would take the newly-open seat at X. It's going to remain much too hot for a while.
July 8, 2025
Some things you just cannot outsource
People who possess real expertise typically stand out to those who themselves know what they're talking about. It doesn't require a lot of preening among a knowledgeable audience; most people are able to recognize authoritative voices within their own domains. ■ On the opposite side, nothing is more predictable than finding people with no particular expertise who are extremely quick to adopt new fads as areas in which to claim expertise. Who can forget the rise of "social media experts", "life coaches", and "personal branding consultants" a few years ago? Where are these lackluster posers today? ■ The latest iteration of this phenomenon is the artificial intelligence evangelist. These are the people who turn to social media tools, trying to establish themselves as authorities with praiseworthy insights on the use of AI -- often positioning themselves as having discovered new innovations of which no one has ever before conceived. ■ The problem with these "tech bros" is that they so often grasp for shortcuts that they overlook enormous flaws in reasoning. A momentary fad currently surrounds the idea of using artificial intelligence to summarize full-length books, with at least one adopting a patently ridiculous claim about "reading" 100 books a day with the help of AI-generated summaries. (That particular individual may have been attempting a tongue-in-cheek gag, but the proliferation of "book summarizer" chat bots suggests that at least some people believe in the concept.) ■ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote in his excellent book, "Flow", that "A person can feel pleasure without any effort, if the appropriate centers in his brain are electrically stimulated, or as a result of the chemical stimulation of drugs. But it is impossible to enjoy a tennis game, a book, or a conversation unless attention is fully concentrated on the activity." ■ To interact with a thought and wrestle with a book, to contextualize a text and consider its ramifications in depth and in real-time, is to experience a written manuscript. To skip the experience is to gain nothing more than the superficial trappings of deeper meaning. ■ Certainly, some things can be gained from summaries, just as students have long relied on cheat sheets and Cliffs Notes to memorize just enough to pass poorly-constructed tests. But the difference remains that of "consumer" versus "learner". A consumer grasps briefly, then moves along, while a learner incorporates the material into a larger array of knowledge. "LinkedIn grifters" may profit from monetizing tips for the lazy in the short run, but only the learners will reap dividends in the long run.
The stupidest possible reboot of "Pygmalion"
People are using ChatGPT to flirt online, then finding themselves with nothing charming to say in real life
July 7, 2025
Fakes and frauds are a growing problem
Subterfuge has a history dating back to the Trojan horse more than 3,000 years ago. As a tactic, it anything but new. But one thing about deception is modestly different today than in the past: Whereas not that long ago, it could be difficult to piece together the trappings of deception, today the Internet and sophisticated manufacturing technologies make it possible to impersonate innumerable roles with ease. ■ Unfortunately, these conditions have led to everything from fraudulent text messages posing as warnings from the DMV to criminal impersonations of Federal officers. Where bad people find openings, they should be expected to enter. This is the essence of what is known as "social engineering": The manipulation of people's perceptions and expectations through the use of intentional techniques. ■ It has always been important for government officials to behave in accordance with established laws and policies. But it has never been more important for them to be rigidly by-the-book when it comes to representing themselves clearly and transparently -- and, perhaps above all, verifiably. ■ Some agencies have begun to recognize the importance of verifiability, like police departments that acknowledge that pulling over immediately for an unmarked police car may not be safe. But many others have a long way to go. Law enforcement officers should readily share badge numbers. Tax agencies should still send statements through the mail on printed letterhead. Websites should be kept up so that details can be verified without using unreliable social media tools. ■ Deception isn't new, so nobody in any position of significance has any excuse for ignoring the need to counteract it. As the tools and resources available to wrongdoers get better, people of influence have to work even harder to make sure that their own authenticity can be checked. The problem isn't going away.
The Merriam-Webster social media team has taken a Fast Company writer to task for using "micro-retirement" as a substitute word for "vacation". It's adorable when children "discover" things everyone knows and make up words to describe them. The charm is long gone by the time one turns 18.
July 6, 2025
Dramatic cuts to portions of the Federal government -- like a likely 40% reduction in the IRS workforce and nearly 20% reductions at NOAA -- have been implemented via both executive actions and the passage of a large tax bill through Congress. Whether those cuts will prove to be prudent or foolhardy remains to be seen. Likewise, whether they prove to be lasting remains to be seen. They are, however, generally here to stay for at least a year or more to come. ■ Under these conditions, it becomes more important than at any time in living memory for people of goodwill and good intentions to join, identify with, and engage in the professional (and quasi-professional) organizations within their areas of expertise. Nearly everyone has at least some subject matter on which they are specialized and can speak with some degree of authority. ■ Workforce reductions at the Federal level are likely to provoke a coming absence of regulatory and statutory guidance on important matters. On some of those matters, state and local governments will still need to know what represents the state of the art. Private-sector actors, like businesses and non-profit organizations, will also need access to the best possible advice. ■ As a country, we have grown accustomed to much of this guidance coming from the Federal government. In some cases, we may have become too reliant. In others, we may come to regret its absence. But in either case, good people need to step forward in a professional or semi-professional capacity to help advise the public as to what's best. ■ We will need expertise from technology experts and engineers, accountants and economists, transportation planners and air traffic controllers. This input has always been useful, but across many domains, the need for thoughtful input from societies dedicated to educational and research activities has almost certainly never been greater. ■ Not every occupation is a profession -- professionals, to be precise, have specialized knowledge and subscribe to some form of ethical code that requires them to put the public interest ahead of self-interest, as when dentists encourage the use of fluoride (a clear case of argument against self-interest). ■ But many occupations have organizations that act mainly to advance the state of the art rather than to line the pockets of their members, and these are the organizations needed most right now. We may even benefit most from a robust set of overlapping and sometimes even competitive organizations (like the American Meteorological Society and the National Weather Association), since competition often has a sharpening effect, and because the resulting joint statements among them often strengthen the cases being made. ■ The ecosystem for good institutions should be lively and well-populated. Increasing complexity is an irreversible factor in most disciplines, and our private activities ought to reflect the importance of honing expert opinions in all of those fields. The first step is for as many good people as possible to get involved wherever they have the best judgment to offer.
July 5, 2025
An enormous flash flood in central Texas has led to a heartbreaking number of deaths, numbering at least in the dozens and including children lost from summer camps along a river basin. ■ Much of the shock follows the nearly unthinkable rate of rise on the Guadalupe River. One atmospheric scientist identifies the rainfall behind the flooding as a once-in-1,000-year event. ■ A scientist at the Weather Prediction Center of the National Weather Service, who issued one of the forecasts the day before warning of flash flooding to come, has already begun unpacking what happened meteorologically and how they attempted to offer advance notice to the public, but it's evident that intensification took place that almost certainly goes beyond what could have been warned with precision. ■ We would be in grave error to ignore the signs that storms over land may be subject to similar kinds of rapid intensification already widely recognized as a problem for hurricane forecasting. It's not a problem for tropical locations alone, either: A storm over southern Iowa caused a dangerous 6" rain total not even two weeks ago. ■ Much more scientific research is in order -- research that has few likely sources of funding other than the public. And the same goes for timely warning systems: We need an institution dedicated to advising and protecting the public, no matter where and without regard as to whether the advice can be monetized. ■ That's what we are supposed to get from NOAA and its various offices and services. Those duties are quite certain to become even more important for the foreseeable future, not less, and if we as the public expect those duties to be fulfilled, we had better realize our part in furnishing the resources to pay for them.
July 4, 2025
Independence Day is the year every good American should re-read the Declaration of Independence in its entirety: At around 1,300 words, it's shorter than some people take to share a sourdough recipe on their cooking blogs. ■ The Declaration is worth an annual re-reading if for no other reason than to remind us that the most important word between a person and their government is the word "No". Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Livingston, and Sherman didn't draft a statement complaining of material things they wanted from England. They instead wrote mainly of things the Royal government did to them, unjustly, which they wanted to stop. ■ It's a laundry list that remains easy to read in plain English even today: "He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power." "He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither". "He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people." "For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world". "For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences". ■ The very first Congress had one word in mind above all others: "No." The government in power was doing them wrong, and they withdrew their consent. Government doesn't exist to extend the benefits of the privileged. "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed", to secure "certain unalienable Rights", including "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness". ■ Security means saying "no" to those who would take those things away. It means saying "no" to behavior that echoes the offenses of King George III. And it means unapologetically saying "no" to encroachments on life, liberty, and the treasured pursuit of happiness.
July 3, 2025
An account filing war dispatches under the username Kate from Kharkiv reveals a moment of deep frustration over a reversal of American promises to send defensive missiles to Ukraine: "I'm expected to be polite. Nice. Tamed. Because technically, my anger won't help us. It won't convince more people or governments to support Ukraine. But know this: war comes when you least expect it. We didn't believe it would come for us. There was no point in it, but it came." ■ There is no owner's manual for life, but wisdom lies in training around pattern recognition. That's always been one of our species's evolutionary advantages, and it's a skill that our brains are well-primed to develop. That training can come from many different disciplines -- there are useful patterns to be discovered in math, language, music, and elsewhere. But it should be obvious that human history is one of the most wealthy sources. ■ During the early stages of World War II, Winston Churchill offered this admonition: "An effort must be made to shake off the mental and moral prostration to the will and initiative of the enemy from which we suffer." A threat had long been visible to anyone who was willing to see it, and finally it came for Britain (and later, for the United States). Looking away didn't deny the threat its power. ■ It would be stupid to look away once more: Not because Russia poses the same threat as the one that endangered Britain in 1940, but because it's undeniably part of a pattern that echoes the old one. Lives of innocent people are being sacrificed because there are madmen in the world, and no amount of looking away will deprive them of their power. ■ "Kate from Kharkhiv" is trying to send us a contemporaneous warning. Churchill sends a warning from the past. It is up to us in the present to have the wisdom to recognize patterns before it is too late.
July 1, 2025
Steadiness is one of the most vital but unloved virtues. The whole structure of civilization quietly depends upon institutions that fulfill expected roles with consistency and without complaint for an indefinite period of service. ■ Imagine, for a moment, a world in which the Mayo Clinic gave up on its position as the medical destination of last resort and instead became a spa for hair transplants and cosmetic surgery. There is no law, statute, or even binding contractual obligation requiring Mayo to remain altriustically focused on care for difficult cases. Yet its steadiness in this regard is invaluable. ■ We miss steadiness when it is gone. When vital institutions wobble from the inside -- or when they are mortally wounded by external forces -- the world is injured by their absence. But it is hard to rise to their defense in a crisis because we often have little or no practice in doing so. Why would we? ■ What we can do is stand for steadiness categorically: Not by being unrepentant defenders of the status quo merely for its own sake, but by appreciating the many complex ways in which things interact and insisting on caution whenever anyone tries to slash and burn their way through institutions (public or private) merely for disruption's sake. ■ A temperamental conservatism (that is, a preservative sense of caution) is necessary far more often than not, as is a respect for good custodianship. Just like accounting and finance and marketing are recognized as disciplines within the realm of business and nonprofit management, so too should we recognize the steady maintenance of useful institutions as a unique discipline. ■ If there can be degrees in innovation and entrepreneurship, there ought to be comparable degrees in responsible custodianship. If some are going to study environmental sustainability in public policy, shouldn't others concentrate on institutional sustainability in public service? A chronic eagerness to change, whether by growth or by cutbacks, isn't a symptom of systemic health.
Gambling losses shouldn't be tax deductions
Losses are the expected price of admission to gambling -- no different from, say, paying a cover charge at a bar. If you win $1000 in a karaoke contest, you should pay taxes on the winnings. It's a lucky windfall. You should not get to deduct all the cover charges you've ever paid.
Electrification, plus a shift to de-carbonized sources of electricity, remains the most likely answer to our climate problem. Graphs showing that per-capita carbon dioxide emissions are plateauing and the price of clean electricity is falling tend to sustain that optimism.
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