Gongol.com Archives: 2016 Second-Quarter Archives
April 4, 2016
How people learn depends on their socioeconomic status
High-income, high-education people turn to the Internet for lifelong learning. People with lower incomes and less education don't as much.
Computer programmers are more self-taught than classroom-educated
A lot of fields reject self-taught" authorities on a subject. Computer programming does not.
You don't have time to run from a tornado you can see
Man stops to film tornado from his attic. It turns and obliterates his home before he can make it downstairs.
Nebraska may go back to a winner-take-all rule in the Electoral College
A sad prospect -- Nebraska is one of the only states to allocate electors by Congressional district, which is actually a sensible practice that more states should follow. Let the overall state winner take the two statewide electors.
What happens with prohibitively-high minimum wages
Tracking the minimum wage to some kind of inflation-related index? Probably reasonable. But large jumps do run the serious risk of causing employers to take drastic measures, like automating or leaving the affected jurisdictions.
April 5, 2016
Why Rwanda is going to get drone-based package delivery before your neighborhood
It all boils down to the need for critical supplies and a shortage of safe and reliable transportation options. One may recall the scene from the late "West Wing" episode in which the retiring CJ Cregg responds as follows to an offer of a $10 billion philanthropic grant: "Highways [...] It's not sexy. No one will ever raise money for it. But nine out of ten African aid projects fail because the medicine or the personnel can't get to the people in need. Blanket the continent with highways and then maybe get started on plumbing."
Expect more chatbots in your world
Businesses are using artificial intelligence to provide customer service without the human customer-service reps
The Internet is now just the internet
How heterosexual American couples meet
Several key methods of meeting seem to be missing from the data (like "mutual interests"), so the graph itself is suspect. But it still seems to strike a lot of people as true.
GAO warns that nobody's in charge of responding to cyberattacks
Once again raising the question: Do we need a dedicated military branch or agency dedicated to cyberwarfare?
A peek behind the curtain of startup mythology
There's a point at which people substitute a lot of dignity for impressions of status. Some tech startups exploit that.
April 6, 2016
Google's habit of dropping products is catching up with it
A customer of a home-automation product acquired by Google is mad because the product -- acquired by Alphabet subsidiary Nest -- is being bricked on May 15th. Is it Google/Alphabet's prerogative to do so? Yes. Does it reflect badly on the company? Yes. Does it undermine the company's reputation for customer support? Yes.
Guest Tweeting is a dangerous game
It's one thing to bring in a "guest editor" to put together a special edition of a magazine. But it's quite another thing to let someone apart from an editorial staff take over the Twitter account of a publication. The New Republic just learned that the hard way.
When a major Presidential candidate isn't serious
Senator Bernie Sanders knows how to whip up a movement, but he's not showing an adequate grasp of his own policies to be able to implement them. That lack of seriousness is not trivial.
How much runway is left for an independent Presidential run to take off?
Not a huge amount, but not zero, either
Who's voting where, for whom, for what reasons -- in a very bizarre Presidential campaign
April 7, 2016
Why you need to own the domain of your name if you're in the public view
A bunch of staffers at Mashable just got laid off abruptly. They work in the public eye, and reports have it their e-mail accounts were shut down as part of the sudden layoffs. People who are (or might be) in the public view need control over their public-facing image, and it doesn't get more public-facing than the Internet.
American admiral wants to challenge China in the South China Sea
But the White House doesn't want him (or people like him) saying anything out loud
Should a fiduciary rule apply to investment advisers?
In theory, a fiduciary rule should apply -- but whether the government should be the party imposing the rule (instead of consumers simply have the requisite knowledge to know what to demand of their service providers) isn't an open-and-shut case. Among other things, it's not enough just to require that the adviser have good intentions -- consumers also need to be able to discern when they're getting bad advice from well-meaning people.
Saving a newspaper the hard way may be the only way
A Boston Globe editor asks his associates to ponder: "If a wealthy individual was to give us funding to launch a news organization designed to take on The Boston Globe, what would it look like?" And that's exactly the right question. All sympathies and sentimentality aside, the value of a company is what it's going to be able to produce in the future. From that perspective, what exists today isn't as important as what an organization would build if starting from a blank sheet of paper.
Verizon moves closer to an offer for Yahoo
Google may be considering a bid, too
April 8, 2016
Disengagement from communities may make people more likely to vote for a terrible candidate
People who are invested -- even just a little bit -- in their local civic institutions are probably less likely to fall for the siren song of a candidate who wants to blow up everything about civic society.
Senate drafts an encryption bill that doesn't have a lot of fans
This is why we need technologically literate adults everywhere, but especially in the halls of Congress
Looking at the microeconomic data may signal a macro recession
When you see freight shipments declining at the biggest railroads (as they are now), you need to question whether all is well in the economy at large
Twitter buys NFL Thursday night game streams for $10 million
Seems like a bargain, and the NFL says it wasn't the highest bid. But it does put the NFL in the middle of the preeminent real-time events service on the Internet, while giving Twitter something new entirely to attract new users. An interesting gamble all around.
SpaceX finally sticks the landing
They managed to launch and then land a rocket, vertically, on a floating platform in the ocean. It was the fifth try and its success means this has been a very, very good week to be Elon Musk. The landing as viewed from the chase plane is downright surreal.
April 9, 2016
The Baltic Dry Index is rising, but it's still at a very low point
Telling signs about the world economy at large -- if shipping costs (as tracked by the index) are very low, then that's a symptom that goods aren't moving on the high seas
A toxic lack of interest in others
Video circulates showing people being attacked in hotels in China as bystanders just let it happen
Kansas City's Federal Reserve chief is a hawk
Someone needs to be the hawk at the table -- even if, on balance, the Fed still probably needs to be dovish
Netflix is going to raise subscription fees
A bunch of people grandfathered into cheap streaming plans are going to have to pay a couple of extra dollars a month
Slumping Yahoo should pick through Google's product graveyard
Google has gotten pretty good at creating products, demonstrating market demand, and then pulling the plug. Yahoo should try harder to be a fast follower.
April 10, 2016
Facebook has some pretty lofty ambitions
It's not a non-profit, and it's not a charity. Users would be wise to keep that in mind.
Neuroscience classes in prison
The effect it has on the incarcerated students tells us some important things about education -- and about what we should seriously consider doing to fix our criminal-justice system
The Treasury doth protest too much
When the Treasury Department issues a special statement announcing that they weren't targeting anyone in particular with a brand-new set of rules (that happen to have a serious impact on a high-profile event), it doesn't take all that much cynicism to suspect that the lady doth protest too much.
Netflix is hiking prices for customers on grandfathered plans
The product is "sticky" enough that it's hard to imagine a lot of people quitting their subscriptions over $2 a month
Some of the best strategies for saving the gorillas may also be very good ways of helping human beings, too
Show notes - Brian Gongol Show on WHO Radio - April 10, 2016
We leave way too much human potential unfulfilled
April 11, 2016
Britain's Daily Mail may want to buy Yahoo
They would use private-equity money to form a new company, but the essence of the deal would still be the same: An old-media company buying a new-media company to give both a shot at survival.
Toyota working on "guardian angel"
A very clever metaphor for the technologies that will eventually accumulate and lead to self-piloted cars for everybody -- but that in the shorter term will at least ensure higher levels of safety by overriding the stupid decisions and slow reactions of human drivers.
Canadian Pacific gives up on bid for Norfolk Southern
The rail industry is already pretty well-consolidated, so further consolidation may be hard to achieve.
"Returnships" for those returning from job gaps
It's a sign that an economy is healthy if people who leave the workforce need to catch up a bit when they return. That means things are changing and improving. Thus it's smart to have ways to help people rejoin the workforce quickly, and "returnships" may be part of the answer.
The over-the-road freight trucks of the future won't always have individual drivers. Testing is taking place right now in the EU, where trucks use automation to communicate with one another to drive in closely-packed series that move more efficiently and use less road space than individual trucks. It's also supposed to save fuel. Pilot testing is underway in Europe.
"Hillary would beat [Trump] from jail"
Tim Miller has a very clever way of looking at things and framing the politics around them. His take on the Presidential race right now is worth a solid 45-minute listen.
April 12, 2016
A dystopian vision of the future
The Boston Globe looked into its crystal ball to see a Trump Presidency and they saw something awful
Nebraska will keep its split Electoral College votes
It's a practice that shouldn't have been threatened in the first place -- more states should follow Nebraska's lead on this and divide their Electoral College votes by Congressional district, with the statewide winner getting the two remaining votes
Speaker Paul Ryan won't run for President (this time)
He's putting his foot down on the idea of being named as some kind of unity candidate. He's needed in Congress now, and almost certainly to an even greater degree after the results of this coming November. The primacy of the Executive Branch needs to be reeled in a bit, and Speaker Ryan is the right person for the job on the Legislative Branch's side of things.
The National Weather Service will kindly stop shouting now
They are at long last changing the format of most of their reports to conventional sentence case, rather than the ALL CAPS format that had been in place since the teletype days. The practice was a technological artifact -- it was necessary when there wasn't sufficient means to send mixed-case messages. But now there is, and since sentence-case messages are easier to read and comprehend, this is a good change.
Facebook introduces 8K-resolution video camera with 360-degree viewing
For those times when it's not just enough to feel like you're there, but also to get serious motion sickness in the process
April 13, 2016
They want more artificial intelligence and more artificial reality
Schumer plan to legislate bigger airline seats fails
Not that today's seats aren't absurdly small and uncomfortable, but legislation isn't the way to fix it -- especially not if people are given the option to pay for bigger seats (and don't)
Lab-grown diamonds are on the way -- in a big way
Fundamentally indistinguishable from organic diamonds, they don't come with any of the ethical baggage and offer creative cutters options they didn't have before
Crooks are trying to break into Netflix accounts not because they want to mess with your ratings, but because they want login information. They can get enough information to trick people using social engineering into giving away credit-card info, and it's also likely that any passwords people use on Netflix are in use elsewhere, too.
"No business being an extrovert"
Another hit from The Onion
April 14, 2016
Public debt is now at nearly unsustainable levels -- and when that triggers a reaction, things could get ugly in a hurry
It would be a good thing if all citizens thought about science more often, but "citizen scientists" is a clever title to offer people for participating in an NYU study of baby sleep patterns. The study asks parents to record their baby's sleeping patterns in a widely-used smartphone app -- something many parents were doing with the app already, but by aggregating the data, they can turn it from micro-information (used by the parents) into a macro-study with far more data points than the researchers were ever going to get by handing out paper surveys.
EMV credit cards are still slowing down checkout lanes
In the long run, a chip-and-PIN system ought to be highly secure for in-person transactions. But in the short run, the inconsistencies in their rollout and use are driving people crazy at the cash register.
Russian jets buzz US Navy warship in the Baltic
It's one thing to show off, and it's another to provoke. This behavior teeters dangerously close to the latter.
Great social-engineering attacks in history
We think of social-engineering attacks as a modern online phenomenon, but they've been around forever. And it helps nothing at all when IT people use techniques that are indistinguishable from those of the attackers.
Microsoft claims coming Windows 10 update will be good for classrooms
Technology alone doesn't and can't fix problems with education, but viewed as a useful tool, technology may be able to help. The less teachers have to be IT people and the more they can simply use their tools, the better.
April 15, 2016
MidAmerican Energy now targets 80% of power generation from wind
They expect to get there by the end of the decade, putting Iowa light-years ahead of everywhere else
The DoD says cyberattacks are now a threat on par with missiles themselves
We're looking at you, Iran and North Korea
Boeing/Lockheed "United Launch Alliance" is making job cuts
New competition has tightened the rocket-launch market
April 16, 2016
A radio play-by-play announcer quits with an online posting. There are so many mistakes made here: The announcement includes misspellings and takes place in a public forum while burning all bridges along the way. These things persist, you know. Something like this becomes the #1 search result in your next job interview. To anyone who doesn't know the back story, this looks like sabotage is your M.O.
Due to printing problems, the Des Moines Register isn't distributing an April 16th printed edition. As pointed out by a former staffer, printing problems used to activate backup plans -- today, it would appear, the answer is to just tell people to access the online edition for free. But if they're really equivalent substitutes for one another, then why go to the trouble of printing and distributing the print edition at all? And if they are not equivalents, then shouldn't a press failure be important enough that some kind of emergency plan can be rolled out? Either the print copy matters or it does not. This response seems to suggest that, institutionally, the latter belief is in the driver's seat.
Unprecedented antisocial behavior in politics
The presence of a candidate who has treated the entire Presidential race like a game of Mario Kart has brought out the worst in a lot of people
Show notes - WHO Radio Wise Guys - April 16, 2016
Streamed live at whoradio.com/listen and archived for later playback on iHeartRadio
April 24, 2016
Bystanders let a man die in a Chicago street
The appalling consequences of the diffusion of responsibility
Steve Wozniak has good advice on learning
It may start in school, but it's a terrible idea to let it end there
San Francisco to require solar panels
Always beware mandates like this one: Ordering everyone to do the same thing in the same way, even on a scale as small as a city, leaves no room for the subtle variances in life that make things that can be seemingly sensible turn into total disasters. Today's solar panels are better than yesterday's, and tomorrow's will almost certainly be better still. Requiring people to install technology that is in the middle of a rapid evolution can backfire: What if all houses in 1990 had been required to include giant satellite dishes, or all cars of the same time required to be equipped with bag phones? And what of flexible circumstances -- like a house that's always in the shade, due to hills, trees, or tall surrounding buildings? It's not like San Francisco is a place of cheap real estate to begin with -- it's already preposterously expensive. Mandates only compound that effect, raising the cost of living for people who already may be finding it hard to get by.
Kanye West may come to regret making promises on Twitter
Words like "never" can be costly when you're trying to get people to pay for things you're selling
They might have had the capability to destroy us, but the Soviets weren't entirely crazy
People watching "The Americans" can be forgiven if they feel a tinge of nostalgia for the Cold War. "Ivan" might have been terrible, but he also didn't have a particular interest in dying. Today's foes aren't always quite so attached to their own skins, and that makes them unsettling in a way that Soviet nuclear weapons never really could be.
April 25, 2016
The fact it's not unusual to do that in the Midwest is a cultural strength that becomes a business advantage. As noted here in 2010, reputations are highly valuable and much too important to risk in even the largest of Upper Midwestern cities. That keeps people generally on their best behavior.
Gannett offers to buy Tribune Publishing for $815 million
Gannett, freshly off a split from its electronic-media properties, is right back to the behavior that got it into trouble in the first place: Unbridled acquisition. The deal would include a massive pile of debt over at Tribune. Bloomberg estimates that Gannett 12% of the nation's daily newspaper circulation, and Tribune has 5%.
Literally -- the ruins of buildings that once housed the functions of the British Empire
"He's with me" versus "I'm with her"
An interesting perspective on the durability of Donald Trump's following
China shuts down iTunes and Apple bookstore
Beware any government that would shut off the flow of knowledge
April 26, 2016
And the company is dependent upon iPhone sales, so that shrinks the revenues to the company
Let it not be forgotten that the disaster at Chernobyl was predominantly the result of human error, compounded by a system that couldn't handle mistakes well
Mitsubishi is in huge trouble for fuel-economy miscalculations
Potentially trailing back for 25 years
Farmers are taking out bigger loans and banks are demanding more collateral
Another sign of rough roads present and ahead for the agricultural economy
Transmitting wind power isn't easy
To get it from where it's produced to where it's consumed requires lots of transmission lines -- and there are political costs to overcome
April 27, 2016
Bill Gates on the future of energy
On this issue, at least, he's a supply-sider
Why Goldman Sachs is opening an online bank
Deposits from people who open savings accounts give them financing that makes the regulators happy
Why isn't the Porsche family intervening more at Volkswagen?
When the family business is in trouble, someone in the family either needs to step in or find someone who can. It doesn't look like that's happening at VW.
Nokia is getting into wearable tech gadgets
The one-time dominant phone maker is out of that game entirely, and now looks at wearables as a growth industry
Chatbots aren't perfect for everything
Sure, there are plenty of circumstances under which people might want to use natural language in order to interact with a firm or organization. But there are also plenty of times when the scope of what a person can actually do with such an organization are fairly narrow and the exchange is best conducted with something like an interactive contact form instead.
April 28, 2016
Joint Chiefs chair: We don't want to go into fair fights
He wants the US Armed Forces to have "the capability and credibility to assure our allies and partners, deter aggression and overmatch any potential adversary"
Comcast is buying Dreamworks for just under $4 billion
Comcast, once just a simple cable company in Tupelo, Mississippi, has gone full-bore for content creation since becoming majority partner in NBCUniversal in 2011. The deal is being spun as a way to get stronger in "family" programming -- though Comcast carefully calls it "the highly competitive kids and family entertainment space". If it weren't "highly competitive", they might face tougher odds gaining regulatory approval. Of course, Disney bought Pixar, and arguments are made that Pixar is the better studio.
Microsoft is testing underwater data centers
Figuring that the preponderance of the world's population lives close to the ocean, they're trying to figure out how to deliver things like cloud computing without taking up valuable landside real estate
Is Yahoo proper really worth -$8 billion?
Stock markets can be terribly irrational sometimes. The tech industry is a brutal marketplace. Together, it adds up to a highly un-enviable spot for Yahoo.
The US is sending F-22 jets to Romania
That's not a recreational trip -- it's a show of force
April 29, 2016
Syrian town of Aleppo now faces utter devastation
A true human disaster
Why everyone should know self-defense, case study #21
Three members of a family got attacked out of the blue in a street in Thailand
Microsoft buys into DNA-based data storage
DNA is, after all, just a means of biological data storage. Whether it can be used synthetically for the same purpose but on a very large scale? That's what Microsoft wants to figure out.
It's getting harder to sell devices
...so Apple is trying to pivot harder into service businesses
What a CEO tells you -- and how -- tells you a lot about the company
Which makes it intriguing that the Alphabet (that is, Google) team took a pass on so doing this year
May 2, 2016
Canadian Supreme Court recognizes Metis as Indians
The Metis, historically identified as the offspring of native or "First Nations" peoples and the French fur traders who arrived later, have long had trouble obtaining legal recognition. Part of the problem, naturally, is that the mixed ancestry of the Metis meant they didn't form a well-defined group. The definition part of the process isn't going to be simple, but the legal recognition is long overdue.
Russia and China close the "weapons gap" with the United States
Their military weapons are improving, and it's hard not to suspect that cyber-espionage against the US defense sector has played a role
Mark Zuckerberg enlarges his domain over Facebook
Investors who care about voting control might need to pay attention
Carnival-affiliated cruise ship docks in Cuba
At some point, Castro Communism has to fall. Will accelerating tourism and economic exposure help hasten that downfall? On a related note, the cruise is being conducted by a Carnival-owned startup cruise line promising that people can take a seven-day cruise and "transform lives". Seems like a stretch.
Nebraska tourism commission paid speaker $44,000 for 90-minute talk
Some quick math: $44,000 for 90 minutes is a rate of $29,333 an hour. At 40 hours a week times 50 weeks per year, that's an annualized rate of just a little shy of $60 million a year. There aren't a lot of people whose time is legitimately valued at that rate, nor is it easy to stomach the idea that a mere speaker could deliver that rate of value to a tourism conference. Seems like a case of spending other people's money on yourself, which Milton Friedman warned usually doesn't result in restraint.
May 3, 2016
Big hikes in the minimum wage are no sure thing for the working poor
Warren Buffett reiterates his argument that the minimum wage is a bad instrument by which to really improve the lives of the working poor. It's not a philosophical argument; it's a practical one. In practice, a higher minimum wage may make a marginal difference to the lives of some adult workers who earn it. But about half of people at minimum wage (48%) are under age 25. Raising the wage by too much will reduce the number of entry-level working opportunities available to them -- which reduces their ability to acquire things like the soft skills and job experience that put them on the ladder to future, higher-quality jobs. Raising the minimum wage to track inflation -- or even just a modest boost -- aren't bad ideas, necessarily, but they aren't real systemic fixes for the deeper issues. Targeted assistance like the Earned Income Tax Credit is probably more efficient at helping the true breadwinners who are at low wages, and ultimately the broader solution is a matter of job training and education. Of all people at or below minimum wage, only 16% have at least an associate's degree. In the long run, we need to fix the training and educational system so that workers have higher market value that places them well above the minimum wage as a market-clearing rate.
Productivity grew during the Great Recession
That doesn't usually happen, apparently
How do you pronounce that food?
Is it "crayfish" or "crawfish"? Depends on where you live.
Doddering old man recycles unfounded conspiracy theories from supermarket tabloids
Regrettably, that crazy person is running for President
Tampa becomes a one-paper town
The economics of the newspaper business have never favored anything other than natural monopoly, anyway -- but high production and distribution costs in a time of digital media are enough to topple almost any duopolies that remain
Iowa's spring scourge of 2016: Creeping charlie
The over-aggressive ground cover is spreading everywhere
May 4, 2016
A self-serving argument from California for abolishing the Electoral College
An academic suggests that it would mean fewer TV campaign ads. Equally self-serving is the argument on behalf of small states that the Electoral College should stay in order to keep us from being steamrolled by the bigger states. But then again, that's exactly why the college takes the form it does.
Johnson County (Iowa) raises its minimum wage
Iowa's most left-wing county will provide a small-scale experiment for the rest of the state to watch
Fort McMurray fires shock the eyes
Canadian wildfires truly stun the viewer
If the endowment gets bigger, why don't tuition rates get smaller?
Warren Buffett obliquely criticizes Grinnell College for its endowment largesse (largely a result of his own work as a trustee) but its failure to make college more affordable with that wealth. The core problem in college costs isn't necessarily funding -- it's the management and administration of higher education. What other industry could behave with such disregard for efficiency?
A strong argument against funding the financial industry
May 5, 2016
House Speaker Paul Ryan "not ready" to support Trump
An exceptional political moment. The prospective Republican nominee is no more a Republican than his expected Democratic opponent.
Why California could be the place to start a non-Trump campaign for exiled GOP members
A state that really isn't going to be in play for anyone but the Democratic Party may be a very good place for someone to run up an alternative gambit
Americans seem not to really want the self-driving car
That's why it won't happen wholesale -- the self-driving car will arrive one piece at a time. But it will arrive eventually.
Even newspaper-friendly UK can't sustain a new paper
A well-backed startup lasted just nine weeks
What's wrong with the German sense of humor?
Such as it is
May 6, 2016
The USGS takes renewed interest in Mount St. Helens
"There is absolutely no sign that it will erupt anytime soon, but the data we collect tells us that the volcano is still very much alive [...] Over the last 8 weeks, there have been over 130 earthquakes formally located by the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network and many more earthquakes too small to be located. Earthquake rates have been steadily increasing since March..."
Speaker Paul Ryan steps up his defense of Republican principles
Withholding endorsement of Donald Trump
A history of Chicago CTA train cars
Surprisingly engaging
Stunning videos from the Fort McMurray fires
People leaving the city in a panic and driving convoys right through the fires. The damage toll could be in the range of $10 billion.
Free Windows 10 upgrades to cease at end of July
The company says Windows 10 is now running on 300 million devices, and that the free upgrade offer for Windows 7 and 8 users will expire on July 29th -- after which, upgrades will cost $119. Still not a terribly high price, but why pay if you have the option to get it free?
May 7, 2016
Beware self-promoting hacks on social media
There are plenty of people willing to sensationalize and exaggerate in the interest of getting more followers
Netflix mobile app to permit more user control over data use
A good step
Counterfeit products get some Senate attention
Lots of copying disincentivizes innovation
They're going to finish in sections so battery production can begin before the building is complete
Federal Reserve independence at risk
The chief of the Kansas City bank worries that the political climate is ripe for bad policy
Show notes - WHO Radio Wise Guys - May 7, 2016
Live on AM 1040 starting at 1:00 pm Central Time, or streamed via iHeartRadio
May 8, 2016
Does socio-economic class mean what conventional wisdom suggests it does?
Possibly not, at least in the voting booth
Economist booted from airplane for doing math
We're at war with innumeracy
May 9, 2016
After the Millennials: Generation Z
The prefer YouTube and Instagram over Facebook
Drone footage of a live tornado
A fantastic use of UAV technology. Why should people place themselves in harm's way if the machines can go there for us and get a better view?
Facebook is putting them in your face
One family business. 1300 years.
That takes longevity to a whole new level.
Self-driving electric cars on the road...next year?
That's the rumor now
May 10, 2016
A major-party Presidential candidate who is all but certain to carry his party's nomination into the general election seems neither to understand the consequences of inflation nor the devastation that would result from a failure to keep the central bank independent. An independent authority over the money supply is a non-negotiable condition for a large, stable economy within a free political system.
Hedge fund managers and their obscene pay
2-and-20: 2% of assets every year, plus 20% of returns year-over-year. That's a huge cut being taken by people who on average are not delivering excess performance.
Good design matters on things like ballots
Clarity and legibility aren't matters just for graphic designers. They matter to public policy.
Is the Libertarian Party failing to capture the moment?
The problem is that the Libertarian Party has far too long been identified with some of its more counter-cultural issues, like the legalization of drugs. The real opportunity right now is for a party in the center of a normal distribution of the population and its political views -- not from some corner of the map of the "world's smallest political quiz". As the parties have drifted apart, they haven't stranded the extremes -- they've stranded the center.
A failure to standardize in a way that crosses over to pure online content has really held back the field
May 11, 2016
When crimes and tragedies show up in live streams
Suicides and other personal tragedies are showing up as people stream their experiences live to the Internet. How can and should the service providers react? Immature young people are making bad decisions with these streaming tools, too. This issue is only going to become more important as the options become universal: Facebook Live is now available to everyone in the US.
Walmart sues Visa over EMV cards
Chips don't make a lot of difference to security without PINs. And nobody's using that part of the card yet.
One more calendar app bites the dust
Microsoft is killing off the "Sunrise" app
They want to deliver the videos upon which YouTube heavily depends
Microsoft to turn off service to share WiFi passwords with contacts
Definitely one of the items that people should have been disabling when setting up Windows 10
May 12, 2016
Used aircraft are now economical
They may be old and less fuel-efficient than newer jets, but fuel costs so little that they may still be economical to fly
Instagram channels 2002 for its redesign
Their new logo and application icons depend heavily on gradients, which are pretty passe in the design world today. The new look really isn't all that new-looking.
How Facebook picks trending news to feature
Mostly a human process, mostly dependent upon what's being covered by a handful of widely-known sources
This is what it's come to for newspapers
The St. Paul Pioneer Press is being "harvested" for parts
No matter how your day has gone today...
...you're not the driver who harassed a cop on I-235, got pulled over in the Valley High School parking lot, and found yourself arrested for flashing a weapon
May 13, 2016
Apple invests $1 billion in a Chinese ride-sharing service
The company is wise to start investing beyond its core business
Airport operators now tell TSA that long security lines are at a "breaking point"
If security becomes impossibly slow, it makes air travel less and less useful
Using a slipstream of bubbles to make ships more efficient
Adding bubbles to the water at the bow of a ship could permit the rest of the vessel to pass through the water with less friction
A closer look at the Hyperloop
Tested successfully over a very short track for a very short time this week, it may be in line for real implementation in the future
Reuters says Berkshire Hathaway is part of a bid for Yahoo
Yahoo may be so vastly under-priced that even the notoriously tech-averse Berkshire has to give it a serious look. It would probably only participate in a deal that leaves Berkshire in the role of investment bank (with someone else responsible for any ongoing operations), but with the right deal, anything is possible.
May 14, 2016
Show notes - WHO Radio Wise Guys - May 14, 2016
With links to the podcast
May 15, 2016
Show notes - Brian Gongol Show on WHO Radio - May 15, 2016
With links to the podcast
May 16, 2016
Speaker Paul Ryan reinvents Kempism for the 21st Century
And there's no way to make up a tenable alliance between his vision of America and the unmitigated, inarticulate goulash of false promises that is Trumpism
Nevada Democratic convention turns out-of-control
This is no way to conduct a democracy
"[W]e are forced to think how to neutralise the emerging threats to the Russian Federation"
& Those are the words of Vladimir Putin
College majors and their shortcomings
Why you should hold back on sharing reactions on Facebook
The escalation from the plain old "thumbs up" to the multi-dimensional reactions may be nice as an expression from friend to friend, but it also gives a lot more potential information to those who aggregate data about Facebook users for commercial purposes
May 17, 2016
A matter of grave concern for the rest of the Western Hemisphere. Not only is the country economically important (as a major producer of oil), but it also has the potential to create a lot of disturbance. And, critically, there is an enormous human cost of suffering that has been building under the country's profound mismanagement by a corrupt and mindless government.
A selfie shouldn't have to be an act of political defiance
Yet it is in Iran, where women are being harassed by the authorities for posting pictures of themselves without head coverings
Sen. Bernie Sanders flies Eastern Airlines
The photographs aren't vintage -- just the livery. His campaign is using a plane bearing the markings of the once-defunct, now-revived heritage airline
Gannett tries to squeeze Tribune
One newspaper publisher tries to ensnare another with a higher bid for its stock
Technology as human adjunct, not replacement
When humans identify the recyclable products inside a waste stream and robots do the physical picking, the process goes much faster and more effectively than either humans or machines alone can achieve
May 18, 2016
Chinese investment brings labor-union manufacturing jobs to south Chicago
A great deal about the story seems incongruous, doesn't it? It's certainly not an organic outcome (that is, it wouldn't have happened spontaneously), but the United States is too attractive a market for investors around the world to resist, and China has a lot of money to put to use. And if that manifests itself in a Chinese company pursuing and winning a bid to build cars for the CTA, and the contract includes a "Buy Chicago-made" provision, then what is organically or spontaneously unlikely becomes possible. Rival bidder Bombardier protests, saying "Buy American" is all that should have mattered, not "Buy Chicago".
The online media outlet, which has been an openly pro-Trump mouthpiece for much of the 2016 campaign, turns a foul attack on Bill Kristol. Shame on them.
Jake Tapper starts asking important critical questions
As one of CNN's premier political journalists, Tapper is in an important role -- one that most of his peer group has failed to execute with enough vigor. Too many of them have treated the rise of Donald Trump as "good television", but haven't acted like bulldog journalists. Good for Tapper for stepping up his questions.
Chelsea Handler show launches on Netflix
The idea of distributing a marquee semi-nightly program via an on-demand service may not be new, but it hasn't really been tried on quite this level before
Important messages need to be delivered well -- and in ways that our brains are capable of processing efficiently
May 19, 2016
Don't dismiss the nightmare scenario of Russia re-invading the Baltic states
A recently-retired British general has published a book saying he thinks Russia might go after Latvia as soon as next year. The book's online description says the nuclear deterrent won't work. When reviewers skewer the writing but then say, "for all the clumsy writing, it is of profound importance when a former Nato deputy commander is screaming at us that the alliance's high readiness task force is a sham", then attention must be paid.
Maybe it's a bit too early to go all-in for the "smart home"
Security flaws let hackers figure out how to unlock doors integrated with the Samsung platform. The hackers, fortunately, were researchers at the University of Michigan and Microsoft, but the proof of concept is enough that it should put on ice the ambitions to connect everything everywhere in the "Internet of Things". Hacking an entire home (or office) is an attractive proposition, so it's best not to be the very first adopter. One of the main problems the researchers identified is "overprivilege", or the granting of too much power to programs and applications to achieve what they're advertised to do.
Google announces "Allo" and "Duo" for release this summer
"Allo" will be their next-generation chat application, with an AI assistant built-in. Duo is to be a 720p HD video chat service.
Charter now owns Time Warner Cable
And they're killing off the Time Warner name. They claim to reach 25 million customers in 41 states.
A global map of Facebook live video feeds
It's the Truman Show come to life. It's not an unequivocally bad thing that people can now live-stream anything they want to Facebook -- think, for instance, of the deployed soldier who can be shown a live stream of a major family event -- but it's also not an unmitigated wonder of the world, either. People make bad decisions, and it's hazardous to let them make bad decisions in front of what is -- at not even the click, but just the hover of a mouse -- a global audience that could easily include lots and lots of people with mal-intent. We should not be in the least bit surprised when a Gresham's Law of sorts swallows up "Facebook Live" -- bad purposes, bad actors, and bad audiences will drive out the good.
May 20, 2016
Google doesn't really want pedestrians to stick to their cars
But if "human flypaper" is part of a broader scheme to make vehicles safer for everyone, then so be it
Observers wonder whether Google is even really trying to get business clients
And the more it cedes that line to Microsoft, the worse Google's future is going to look
Black renters pay meaningfully higher prices on AirBnB
So says a study from January, saying discrimination against African American renters shows up both in prices and in the agreement to even make a deal.
The race to get artificial intelligence into your home
The scramble to get AI integrated into people's lives will have interesting effects on how we perceive what thoughts are our own and which ones we share with a digital surrogate or adjunct.
Facebook leadership takes meeting with conservative politicos
Reviews of the meeting seem to suggest that it went down exactly as expected: The site's perceived political bias against conservatives appears to be a problem for the business model, so it will be corrected not out of political motivation but out of the pursuit of profits.
May 21, 2016
Show notes - Wise Guys on WHO Radio - May 21, 2016
The week in trends, tips, and technology
May 22, 2016
Show notes - Brian Gongol Show on WHO Radio - May 22, 2016
The week in making money and having fun
May 23, 2016
The imperial Presidency is a pox on American civilization, and it needs to be stopped before the next President. Our options aren't looking good, and whomever is inaugurated in January 2017 needs to be restrained by the law much better than recent Presidents have been. Never take powers while in office that you wouldn't want your opponents to have when they're in charge.
The Swiss are voting on a national minimum income
Not the worst idea that could happen. If there's going to be an extensive welfare state, perhaps it makes sense to apply it with the maximum degree of individual autonomy and self-control possible -- and a guaranteed income may be the way to do it. Or perhaps not. Much depends on whether there would be an adequate support structure in place to ensure that people knew what to do with their guaranteed incomes.
Tribune Publishing may counterpunch at Gannett
Both companies have recent experience with disastrous amounts of debt...and this new arms race is only going to end in a debt disaster, too.
MidAmerican Energy tests a new ultra-tall wind turbine
Taller turbines may give them a better chance to capture stronger, more sustained winds at higher altitudes
Internet trolls on the Chinese government payroll
It's a real thing. A real and awful thing.
May 24, 2016
Much of America is in recession
The county-by-county data isn't as rosy as it could be
Mobile data consumption is skyrocketing
It's inevitable that data usage will increase -- unless some very significant changes are made to the way that content is delivered, and there's little chance of that happening anytime soon, at least not at the same pace as new usage escalates.
Microsoft is getting really aggressive about pushing Windows 10 upgrades
Better to make the upgrade when you've set aside a couple of hours to manage it than to wait for it to be thrust upon you
Touching story of some girls at Boys Town
Five girls are graduating together from high school, much better off than when they arrived
French authorities raid Google offices over taxes
The perils of international business
May 25, 2016
Syrian refugees are human beings first
It's disappointing to see them discussed like some abstract concept (especially when it's by people who only want to say awful things about them). They are real human beings living real human lives under terrible circumstances, and like people all over the world, the vast majority -- probably 99% -- are good and decent.
Meth cookers burn down home, then set fire to their hotel room
A story that might almost be funny if it didn't mean other people's lives were at risk -- including other guests at the same hotel and the couple's children. Behavior like this is wonton negligence and cries out for a very firm intervention by law enforcement.
What it really means when couples over-share on Facebook
They may very well be enjoying one another's company, but they also may be trying too hard to obtain their self-esteem from the approval of people outside the relationship looking in
A former member of Iowa's Board of Regents opines on the departure of UNI's president
UNI is a great university, but the system surrounding it is creating artificial problems
West Des Moines Police to target distracted driving
They plan an all-summer effort to crack down on "speeding, failure to obey traffic control devices, improper use of lanes, texting while driving and failure to utilize seat belts"
May 26, 2016
As robots do more, who's responsible when they do something wrong?
In the long run, it's important to do a couple of things. First, government can do well simply to draw a line somewhere -- a clear line -- so that the market can respond by allocating the costs of the damage done by wayward robots. Cutting the check isn't the same as paying the price, so it doesn't matter quite so much whom the law saddles with liability. What matters is establishing the rule itself so that the costs can be allocated efficiently by the marketplace. (Think of real-estate agent fees: The seller "pays" the agent, but the cost comes from the sale price, which is ultimately paid by the buyer. The agent's commission comes partially out of both the seller's and buyer's pockets, even if only one of them technically cuts the check.) What's also important is that the benefits of automation (which tend to be diffuse, or spread out across lots of people who each benefit a little bit) don't get overwhelmed by the concentrated costs (like those of the people who might be injured by faulty robotic systems). In other words, we have to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, even if there end up being terrible, high-profile stories of people injured or killed by malfunctions. The aggregate gain to society will still be enormous, even if some people pay a very high price. That may very well indicate that a case ought to be made for a national insurance pool for such errors -- otherwise, the cost of private insurance may be prohibitive if the potential costs of liability appear to be unlimited.
Gov. Susana Martinez -- a Republican -- fires back at Donald Trump
And good for her. Trump's behavior is erratic, nonsensical, and wildly unbecoming a candidate for President of the United States. His continued attacks on members of the Republican Party are petty and unprincipled and only further serve to reveal him not as an authentic Republican, but as a virus that has infected the party.
It's practically everyone's favorite tech rumor, and Morgan Stanley now boards the train, arguing that Apple's recent investment in a ride-sharing company in China is indicative of a serious focus on transportation.
Pebble returns to Kickstarter roots
Launching three products at once: Pebble Core (a cellular-enabled super-compact computer aimed at runners who don't want to carry their phones and at developers who want something tiny to hack), Pebble 2 (a $99 next-generation black-and-white smartwatch), and Pebble Time 2 (with a big color display for $169).
Lenovo has trouble integrating Motorola
Lenovo bought the phone-maker from Google in 2014 and that was after it collapsed in value by about 75% under Google's control.
May 27, 2016
Microsoft and Facebook are teaming up to build an undersea cable between Virginia and Spain to transmit Internet content at 160 terabits per second -- a pretty wide thoroughfare for data. Microsoft is investing because it's investing full-tilt in the cloud computing market. Construction is to begin this August with completion by October 2017.
Dr. Heimlich gets to use his eponymous maneuver for the first time
At age 96, he uses his technique to directly save a life for the first time
Just don't accept Facebook friend requests unless you're sure
Scam after scam after scam keeps popping up, and it's all because people are too loose with their "friend" requests
Turnarounds must be a lot of fun (for the right manager)
Nissan took a controlling stake in Mitsubishi Motors after Mitsubishi's market price plunged because of a massive misstatement of fuel economy ratings for its vehicles. Nissan is run by Carlos Ghosn, who seems to be very, very good at turnaround situations.
Canada geese: From near-extinction to annoying overpopulation
They're pretty obnoxious birds
What should really alarm us about the nuclear threat
As the President visits Hiroshima, nuclear weapons return to the front pages (at least for a little while). A few worries: The nuclear arsenals of the world (and the command-and-control structures surrounding them) are old and may not have been adequately maintained. There are plenty of weapons in places where political leaders (and military ones) may not be adequately grounded in reality. Imprecise tracking of fissionable material may make it too easy for non-state actors to make weapons of their own. And even if the prospect of all-out nuclear attack seems altogether improbable, nobody can really certify that an "oops" engagement is an impossibility (that is, given the right resources and the right set of conditions, we can't be sure that a weapon might not be engaged in a way that could be made to look accidental). These are real worries.
May 29, 2016
Book review: "Big Deal" by Bruce Wasserstein
If you find the subject of mergers and acquisitions interesting, this book won't dull your feelings -- but prepare for a long slog.
Book review: "Me of Little Faith", by Lewis Black
Interesting enough company to keep for listening in the car, provided you aren't offended easily by someone dismissing faith and don't hav any children in the vehicle with you.
Show notes - Brian Gongol Show on WHO Radio - May 29, 2016
Live on WHO Radio at 9:00 pm Central Time
May 30, 2016
Had it been a work of fiction, nobody would believe it -- but it's an important documentation of modern financial history
May 31, 2016
Microsoft doesn't like your password
If it's one of the most common passwords, the company isn't going to allow users to employ it. They're going to "dynamically ban common passwords", based on the lists they can automatically generate of the most over-used passwords. That means "123456" is out, and so are a lot of others like it. Microsoft will use the new dynamic banning policy on Microsoft accounts like Hotmail, Outlook, Xbox, and OneDrive. Unsurprisingly, they're also pushing users to activate two-factor authentication, too. Interestingly, Microsoft's research finds that it's actually counterproductive to force people to change passwords regularly because it leads to the use of more predictable passwords. And people are already dangerously predictable.
Gary Johnson talking sense on immigration
Growing reason to take seriously the Libertarian candidate
There are too many versions of Android floating around
What's good for Google -- to have the single, latest OS out there universally -- is bad for the phone-sellers who want people to have to buy new hardware to get the latest software
Trump adviser says the Orange Menace would make the Vice President do all the work
Nobody needs an over-eager, micromanaging President. But we're fools if we're hiring someone who doesn't plan to do the job.
Series of shipwrecks kills 500 people in Mediterranean
If 500 Americans or Europeans died in a plane crash, it would make non-stop headline news. There should be no less respect for the loss of lives from Syria and other troubled nations.
Book review: "Stand for Something", by John Kasich
Certainly not the worst political memoir/position book ever written, but definitely not as strong as Kasich's actual record
June 1, 2016
Donald Trump's completely inadequate summer reading list
He claims (dubiously) to be planning to get through a book on Hillary Clinton, a book on Richard Nixon, and "All Quiet on the Western Front". Real leaders need to read widely and be able to talk and write about what they've been reading. Theodore Roosevelt was a voracious reader, reputedly speed-reading a full book a day. In Benjamin Franklin's words, "From a Child I was fond of Reading, and all the little Money that came into my Hands was ever laid out in Books." Our military leaders insist on sharing long and thoughtful reading lists for the professional development of the officers serving beneath them. A dignified occupant of the White House should be a reader-in-chief as well.
Australian government confuses "CC:" for "BCC:"
In telling thousands of women who had applied for consideration in government appointments that they would need to follow a different procedure to apply, someone in the government used the "CC:" field to address the list. The problem, obviously, is that the field is open to everyone on the list -- and while email addresses aren't strictly private things, revealing thousands of addresses tied to a specific program definitely isn't a savvy way to manage anyone's IT.
Twitter suspends parody account mocking Putin
Was there concern that "@darthputinkgb" would somehow be confused for the real person? Hardly. The parody tweets were original and unmistakably mocking. One of the highest roles to be played by free speech is in permitting people to mock their political leaders.
And if you have a legacy account there, you should seriously consider resetting your password or pulling the plug on the account altogether
Elon Musk says Tesla 3 owners will have to pay for their own charges
The fancier, higher-end cars (Models S and X) come with free charging at the company's Supercharger sites, but Tesla wants people to charge their cars at the home and office. There's one Supercharger site in Iowa. The advantage to using the Tesla chargers is that they are so much faster than regular charging.
June 2, 2016
Google Express launches -- aggressively -- all over and around Texas
Next-day delivery (or two-day delivery) for a lot of goods is promised all over the state, not just in densely-populated areas as one might expect.
Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter agree to a European code of conduct
They promise to take down hate speech within 24 hours. It's a complex issue: On one hand, sunlight is usually the best disinfectant -- so revealing the identities of people with awful things to say and subjecting them to public shame and scorn would likely be more productive than scrubbing their comments...but anonymity is so easy to achieve online that it's probably not plausible to do so. On the other hand, when hateful speech takes up space in the public square (as the Internet now serves), people may begin to see it as normal rather than deviant. It's not a conscious or deliberate act to accept anti-social behavior as normal; it's just a natural consequence of familiarity.
King Tut's dagger didn't rust because it was partially made of meteorite
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that something special like a space rock would have been used to make something for a king
Saudi Arabian government fund to invest $3.5 billion in Uber
Uber is supposedly pushing hard to expand in the Middle East, and the investment satisfies Uber's hunger for cash investment and the Saudi government's need to put oil profits to use in industries other than petroleum. Having a great endowment of any natural resource (like oil) can subject an economy to a perverse natural-resources curse. Whether investments like one in Uber are the right ticket out isn't a certainty, but it's likely a step in the right direction.
June 4, 2016
Show notes - WHO Radio Wise Guys - June 4, 2016
Trends, tips, and technology
June 5, 2016
It appears to be a physiological response to permit us to grasp things with wet hands
A potential case for demolition bonds
Small communities are having trouble paying to remove old buildings that have outlived their usefulness (and often contain perils like asbestos). It may make some sense to require every new building to come with a bond for its own demolition. The costs are real, even if we don't think about them.
Denmark's kinda-creepy way of reversing population decline
If the young people aren't making enough babies, shame them into doing it for Grandma. And get Grandma to kick in for the cost of a romantic vacation.
Delta says 90% of flights will come with free onboard entertainment by July
A few hundred movies and several hundred TV episodes will be available over the WiFi signals in Delta planes. That's a huge change from just a few years ago, when most electronic signals were forbidden in-flight.
Alphabet/Google subsidiary Nest moves CEO to "advisory" role
The transition from startup to subsidiary isn't always an easy or satisfying one
Show notes - Brian Gongol Show on WHO Radio - June 5, 2016
Live on WHO Radio (AM 1040) starting at 9:00 pm Central Time, or streamed on iHeartRadio
June 6, 2016
Senator Ben Sasse: No, I'm still not for Trump
He notes: "[T]he Libertarian Party is something I would certainly consider in the long term", while generally looking unfavorably at the future of the two major parties. Note, though, that the only things that would really run the two-party system off the rails would be proportional voting (not likely to happen inside our federalized system, in which states are independent of one another on Election Day), fusion voting (which is worthy of very serious consideration), or a fundamental breakdown in the value that the party structure brings to the electoral process (which it's too early to say has happened for certain, but isn't entirely outside the realm of plausibility). The stable outcome of a first-past-the-post electoral system like ours is going to be a two-party/two-coalition system. What we're experiencing right now is a deep disruption to both of the coalitions that form the two major parties.
Book review: "Seven Principles of Good Government", by Gary Johnson
Johnson's book is actually even more mainstream in 2016 than it was in 2012 -- and well worth reading; the campaign is making a mistake by not printing and giving away millions of copies
Teaching survivors of human trafficking how to code
A laudable means of empowering those whose lives were disrupted by evil. The ability to support one's self -- particularly with a high-value skill -- is an important human condition.
The Federal Reserve is under almost-constant cyberattack
That doesn't make it any different from almost all big financial institutions, but it's a reminder that today's "wars" don't always take place on fields of physical battle
Laugh about it if you want. Call it frivolous if you must. But recognize that labor-saving devices make our lives better all the time and they soon enough just become part of the background of daily life and we hardly ever acknowledge how much time and effort are being saved by everything from crock-pots to dishwashers.
AP says Hillary Clinton has locked the Democratic nomination
And the November general-election matchup is now set, barring any bizarre circumstances (and it's been a bizarre campaign)
June 7, 2016
"I can change, I can chaaa-nge!"
Donald Trump's behavior as a Presidential candidate (and now presumptive Republican nominee) is a lot like the Saddam Hussein character in the South Park Movie: Lots of promises to change, and then no real change whatsoever. It's no wonder (though it is worthy of note) that one Iowa State Senator has quit the party in protest.
Marketing company claims research shows big drop in time spent on social-media sites
Whether that's correct analysis or suspicious data is worthy of further investigation. It doesn't particularly seem like people are spending less time with social media, but there's also the possibility that people are getting real about the huge amount of time that they're devoting to what is fundamentally non-productive activity. The advice remains: Less time with Facebook, more time with book-books.
Wall Street Journal says Verizon wants to buy Yahoo's operating business for $3 billion
Second-round bids were due on Monday
Facebook is making the Messenger app mandatory
Facebook knows best. Just ask them.
Woman tracks down the person who saved her life a quarter-century ago
She was in a terrible car wreck as a minor. A nearby truck driver also happened to be a paramedic. He probably saved her life by acting until rescue services could arrive -- but he couldn't follow up because she was a minor. They got in touch briefly long ago, then lost touch, and have found each other again. There's still a great deal of good in most people.
June 8, 2016
Paris floods of 2016 vs. Paris floods of 1910
Side-by-side photos tell the story brilliantly
Parentheses used as a symbol of hate
ADL highlights the use of the "echo" symbol as a tool of antisemitic thugs
ISIS murders women who refuse sex slavery
Unconscionable evil exists in this world. These are serious times.
Self-awareness isn't for chumps
Metacognition isn't a strong suit for everyone. It's just unfortunate that some people who utterly lack self-awareness are this close to the seat of power.
Former Secret Service agent publishes "tell-all"
And that should probably be strictly forbidden as a term of employment -- and future receipt of things like retirement benefits. How can a protectee trust their protectors if they have concerns about being "revealed" in a future publication?
June 9, 2016
Can artificial intelligence make human art better?
Purists will probably reject the idea that computers can help human beings to create art. But if many sketch artists and cartoonists learn by tracing the work of others, and if young musicians practice their chops by playing covers of known favorites, then what's the loss in creativity if we use computers to generate starter ideas that human beings can build upon? Whether or not it leads to any "great" art, this kind of technology should lead to computers that do better at human-like tasks, which we need. But in the end, what harm could possibly come from introducing more good art in all its forms into the world? It shouldn't have to be rare to be valuable.
The North Korean people are trapped by a revolting, authoritarian state. The system is what's wrong. We should have deep sympathy for the people trapped under it.
The consequences of a toxic ticket at the top of the ballot
People are highly disinclined to vote split tickets between the White House and their House and Senate races. So a bad Presidential ticket is potentially poisonous down-ticket. This election is so strange that it's possible we will see odd voting patterns -- like people who vote exclusively for the top of the ticket (and skipping downballot races as an act of protest because they reject "politicians" altogether) or the opposite, in which party regulars (especially Republicans) leave the top of the ticket blank because they can't force themselves to commit to either major-party choice.
What in the environment could trigger Type 1 diabetes
If you're genetically predisposed, everything from respiratory infections in infanthood to psychological trauma in adulthood could play a part in triggering diabetes
Tesla is going to sell a cheaper Model S
The Model S 60 will come with a base sticker price of $66,000 -- considerably less than the base price for the fancier version of the same, which runs to just shy of $90,000.
June 10, 2016
Promise and perils of using the Amazon Mechanical Turk for social science
It's hard to get the right subjects in the right quantities to do real social-science research. The Mechanical Turk might help -- or it might only look like it's helping.
A fantastic visualization of yield curves
You could spend four years in college going to economics classes to understand yield curves, or you can watch a 9-point slideshow from the New York Times that captures the concept brilliantly. Or both, if you really want to.
The United States isn't supposed to export political risk to the world economy
When American business leaders are forced to explain the prospects of a nightmare candidate making it to the Oval Office, it has real costs to the world economy.
Gawker Media files for bankruptcy
Rather than try to pay $140 million to Hulk Hogan after losing a lawsuit to him over invasion of privacy, the company just hopes to sell itself to Ziff Davis after getting bankruptcy protection. Gawker has made serious errors in judgment before, so perhaps it isn't surprising that a bad call has landed the company in today's trouble.
Georgia, Ukraine want into NATO as soon as possible
And with unpredictability the rule in neighboring Russia, who could blame them? Of course, it's also possible that Russia would take the very act of NATO enlargement as a sign of aggression (and quite likely would), so this is a complex problem.
June 11, 2016
British intelligence exec: The "Internet of Things" is too attractive for terrorists to resist
And they'll try to exploit its inevitable security shortcomings to try to do massive harm to society
Stephen Colbert puts third party Presidential ticket in the spotlight
Some pop-culture exposure could go a long way
June 13, 2016
The leopard doesn't change his spots
Anyone who continues to hope that Donald Trump will start behaving like a civilized candidate for the Presidency of the United States is going to end up disappointed. Better to shift away allegiances now, rather than to wait for the inevitable disappointment.
Microsoft is buying LinkedIn for $26 billion
Of all the social networks, LinkedIn has the greatest staying power because it has a specific, business-oriented raison d'etre -- Facebook may be almost universal and Twitter may be ingrained deeply with certain power users and Instagram may be the platform for rebellious youth, but none of them serve an essential business purpose. LinkedIn manages to do that. If you're betting on which of these will still be around in 15 or 20 years, bet on LinkedIn. That doesn't mean that Microsoft is (or is not) paying a reasonable price for it; only that it is buying the most durable asset of its class.
Should smaller investors have access to choices like their wealthier counterparts?
"Accredited" investors have access to a lot of things that smaller investors do not -- but while that's intended as a measure of protection for the "little guy", it also keeps people who want to take venture risks (even with eyes wide open) from doing so. In practice, that means preserving some highly attractive opportunities for those who are already relatively wealthy. Good intentions do not always mean positive results.
One is under development now
"Developed" doesn't always equal "civilized"
Qatar has a tremendous amount of prosperity going for it -- but the government there convicted a Dutch woman of adultery in a case involving her own rape. It may be a culture, but that is not the behavior of a civilization.
June 14, 2016
Consider the honorable alternative
A Bloomberg poll conducted by the highly reputable Ann Selzer firm shows Hillary Clinton well ahead of Donald Trump in national opinion polling. What matters in the end is not the national poll but the Electoral College split, but it's a big gap. And quite notably, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson shows up with 9% of the vote. Johnson appears to represent the most palatable third option that will appear on the ballot in November -- a two-term governor of New Mexico who held office as a Republican. Johnson right now appears to offer an honorable alternative for those voters who have spent 25 years digging in their heels against Hillary Clinton but who cannot stomach the specter of Donald Trump. Johnson is experienced and eligible in his own right, and while his party may act a little goofy, his principles and his track record both square well with the limited-government tradition that seems to be in exile from the Republican Party this year.
How the Russian government may meddle with the US election
It's not a purely abstract concern -- the Russian government hacked the Democratic National Committee's computer network and stole their research on the presumptive Republican nominee. They're not just casually disinterested in the outcome of this November.
"[A]ssaulting fundamental liberal democratic values"
The Washington Post editorial board responds to being banned from Donald Trump's campaign events. And they're right: It is fundamentally at odds with the values of openness and Western civilization for a candidate for President to banish a reputable, mainstream institution from covering his events because he doesn't like their coverage. It's petty and beneath the dignity of the office to which he aspires. One of the Post's staff humorists has responded with a tongue-in-cheek style guide to covering the candidate, which recommends against describing the candidate as "what results if you accidentally leave Guy Fieri in a microwave".
Get the process right and the results will follow
A thoughtful critique of all those well-meaning but misguided commencement addresses that tell young people to follow their dreams
Apple is going to put Siri inside the Mac platform
Artificial intelligence and virtual assistants are both creeping their way more and more into the mainstream
June 15, 2016
The President should have a capacity for abstract thinking
Political analyst Nate Silver notes that Donald Trump "learns by rote rather than being an abstract thinker". He is quite likely right about that. When Trump speaks apart from unprepared remarks, his language is starkly concrete: That is, he almost never uses metaphors, similes, or other abstractions. When he says he wants a "big, beautiful wall", there is every reason to believe that he is speaking quite literally about a very large wall. Trump is, after all, known mostly for his real-estate ventures, and those are almost universally known for their emphasis on superficial ostentation: You don't move to Trump Tower because you appreciate subtleties, you move there because you want to show off every possible indication of glitz (no matter how gaudy or gauche). He participated in the construction of an otherwise attractive skyscraper in Chicago, then garishly slapped his name across it in giant letters, to the chagrin of the architect. He doesn't appeal to abstractions like a "shining city on a hill". This may not seem like a problem on first glance, but the fact is that the Presidency is not bounded by concrete problems -- most of the big issues require an exceptional capacity for complex, abstract thought. If it were all a matter of simple, concrete matters easily resolved in the physical world, the Presidency would be something much less than it is. But simplistic concretism is not what the Oval Office requires. The Presidency is usually defined not by what the elected individual thinks he or she is going to do, but rather by the unexpected events to which the administration must react: Events like 9/11 or the collapse of the Iron Curtain. To occupy the office requires an intuitive curiosity about the world and a high-level ability to see the abstractions of the world. Whether you like a candidate's policies or not, this ability is a functional requirement of the job, and a person who doesn't possess that ability is unsuited to the great responsibility.
The Riviera in Las Vegas has been demolished
More than any comparable country, America knows when to blow up the old and replace with the new. Las Vegas does this better than anywhere else. Sentimentality has its place, but utility should win more often than not. Once something is no longer useful, it's time to replace it with something that is.
The disposition of everything Yahoo has bought under Marissa Mayer
An interesting mix of independent products, fold-ins, and acquisitions strictly used to obtain talent
Why IBM is now in the weather-forecasting business
Companies like IBM, Google, and Apple are well-advised to apply their technological advantages in markets where advanced computing can provide a competitive advantage. Weather forecasting is one of those areas -- pharmacological research and other subjects where sophisticated modeling would also be appropriate.
Facebook working on suicide-prevention tools
Technology is only good insofar as we use it to make people's lives better. So if social media is used as a tool for bullying, it must on balance also provide tools to offset the harm that may come about -- and to be "good", rather than neutral, then social-media sites need to help people who might have slipped through the cracks even in a world without social media.
The AP has spoken: It's the Chicago L
It should be the "El", since the name comes from the original "elevated". But the AP has spoken.
June 16, 2016
San Francisco municipal rules are strongly discouraging Airbnb hosts
Municipalities have every right to set reasonable regulations regarding the interests of health and safety. But it's extremely easy for those regulations to become a tool for limiting competition and protecting entrenched interests. San Francisco should beware that hazard. The temptation is great to protect the interests of the well-entrenched, but that behavior (called "rent-seeking" by economists) only serves to harm consumers and the prospective competitors who are squeezed out by the regulations.
A cartographic look at the influx of refugees into Europe
It's a migration of truly historic proportions, and it will be noted in the history books decades from now. History, though, is often hard to see when it's happening right before our eyes. Europe's challenges are huge: To welcome the newcomers with grace and human dignity, and to quickly get those newcomers to embrace liberal Western values. One of the major threats to those two things is the risk of xenophobia and populist nativism: If people who are refugees feel like they are being rejected and isolated, they may have a harder time embracing local values. Some historical context is in order: Remember that the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church (two of the defining institutions of Western Civilization) made vast use of syncretism in order to spread their influence. At the margins of cultures, the key is to embrace and co-opt -- not reject.
Vanity Fair says it's under serious discussion, and there's no reason to be surprised by this. Trump's Presidential campaign has been a publicity stunt since the beginning, and now it's gone totally off the rails. A rational person in his position should have walked away from the "campaign" months ago, before it was too late, and leaving on his own terms. But instead, now he faces nothing but unpleasant outcomes: A revolt at the national party convention, an electoral loss to Hillary Clinton, or the prospect of somehow obtaining an office he is unfit to hold. The idea of using the campaign as a base from which to launch a cable TV network may be the only way to lock in something resembling a victory at this stage.
A worthwhile examination of "marked" speech
When racists and anti-Semitic bigots use things like parentheses to "mark" names for online harassment, civilized people need to understand the symbols being used so that they can repel the implicit hate speech involved
Twitter already owns Periscope, so maybe a SoundCloud investment isn't such a big leap. And on a related note, Twitter has just tightened its integration with Periscope, so live video streaming is now a one- or two-click operation from within the Twitter app.
June 17, 2016
You may be a social-media news consumer, but that doesn't mean you've quit traditional sources
Television and print newspapers seem to be moderately depressed by social-media usage; radio is untouched; news websites actually appear to gain considerably.
US Court of Appeals upholds FCC's net neutrality policy
Its treatment as a public utility has consequences -- "net neutrality" isn't a perfect paradigm. There are solid reasons to give some data preferential treatment from a practical standpoint -- even if it's not particularly attractive as a philosophy.
Chicago City Council moves ahead with tougher rules for ride-sharing
The least-surprising words in the Chicago Tribune report: "The ordinance, promoted by the taxicab industry..." Fingerprints, background checks, drug tests, chauffeur licenses, minimum fleetwide wheelchair accessibility, pricing, and response time rules are all included. Protections on health and safety can have their place, but the accumulation of proposed regulations looks a lot more like an effort to stifle competition than to serve the public. Restrict new market entrants too much and they might just quit your market altogether.
Walmart has announced it will stop accepting Visa cards in mid-July because the card company charges too much on transaction fees. Small retailers are understandably excited to have a big dog joining them in the fight. The fees charged by the credit-card companies in North America are much higher than in other countries and it's high time they experienced pushback.
Facebook Live appears to have captured a man's murder
Don't forget who warned a month ago that Facebook Live would become a troublesome place in little or no time at all
June 20, 2016
Book review: "The Ten Commandments for Business Failure", by Donald Keough
A book that ought to be used in business schools to offer a capstone perspective on leadership.
Book review: "Between Worlds", by Bill Richardson
An interesting political time capsule left behind by a politician whose ideology has largely gone missing
How would America look with a multi-party electoral system?
The Economist comes up with a model suggesting how we might look as a "parliamentary" democracy. It's only a hypothetical model, but it's a clever illustration.
St. Louis Federal Reserve rethinks macroeconomic forecasting
No more forecasts of some future long-run steady state. Just a guess at different periods that could emerge.
Toyota calls automotive artificial intelligence "guardian angel" technology
This is how the self-driving car becomes a permanent reality. It won't happen in one giant leap (like the Google model), but rather via incrementalism -- culminating in a broad public acceptance that the technology has eclipsed human capacities to drive safely. Autonomous-vehicle technology has to prove that it makes us safer in steps -- if it is measured by the lives it saves from human error, it will be seen as an advancement; if it is measured from an assumption that self-driving cars are perfectly safe, then it will be doomed in the court of public opinion because some accidents will be inevitable.
June 21, 2016
How much does it cost to break even on drilling for oil in America?
The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas finds that producers say anywhere from $9 a barrel to $60 a barrel, but averaging from $29 to $43, depending on location
Des Moines and Omaha trounce other cities at total livability
Affordability, family-friendliness, modest prosperity -- it's a full-package deal
Global Risk Institute worries that debt is reaching chokepoint levels
One executive says "There's debt being piled upon debt being piled upon debt." At some point, rates must rise.
One highly anxious economic analysis
There are too many uncertainties and lingering problems for it to be anything like a boom. The question is whether it's destined to become a bust -- and that's not clear.
The Trump campaign isn't behaving like a campaign
Probably because it's just a perpetuation of what began as an exercise in shameless self-promotion and has never grown more serious than that. They're funneling 20% of their spending back into Trump interests and circling the wagons against any outside influence.
June 22, 2016
Three critical traits of a good elected official: Curiosity, competence, and humility
And if a candidate for office never leaves a bubble of self-reinforcing messages and ventures out to learn more (or even acknowledges that there is more to be learned), then that candidate is dangerously unqualified for just about any job in the public trust.
Chicago passes new regulations on Airbnb
A local community has the right to a considerable amount of self-determination, but it should also be considered whether regulations are actually being used to preserve the health and safety of the public, or if they're just being used as a blunt instrument because some people don't like some things. The opponents of short-term home rentals in Chicago include some people who say that it's dragging down their neighborhoods by creating transient communities. Some supporters, though, come from among those who need to make income off their homes when not in use just in order to make the payments. In theory, home-sharing should be a social good -- if it's putting homes to use that otherwise would have been unoccupied for a day, a weekend, or even a month, then it's highly efficient to put those properties to use. That doesn't mean that abuses and other externalities couldn't become a factor; they could. But we have to be hesitant to use the blunt instruments of regulation.
More regulations and higher minimum wages appear to be reducing options for young workers
The less fluid the labor market becomes, the harder it is to enter. That may seem like a luxury to people who are already up the food chain, but when you keep young people out of the labor market at ages 16 through 25, you keep them from getting on a track to upward mobility. Soft skills matter!
His wife died suddenly just after giving birth to twins. A remarkable situation and story.
The Iowa Governor's Traffic Safety Bureau is holding a summit on drowsy driving on June 29. While often overlooked in the shadow of its nasty counterpart drunk driving, drowsy driving (and other forms of distracted or impaired driving) remains a major public-health problem. The sooner assistive technologies can be widely applied to vehicles, the better off we all will be.
June 23, 2016
One Elon Musk venture acquires another. It probably makes abstract sense without making practical sense: They may very well fit together, but they both struggle to make a profit.
Social Security Trustees issue annual report
The Social Security program is officially going to begin running deficits by the end of the decade. And "the Medicare Hospital Insurance (HI) Trust Fund will be depleted in 2028, two years earlier than projected in last year's report". We're in a world of trouble.
Airbnb confronts problems of discrimination
As more freedom and laissez-faire finds its way into some markets (like lodging), it reveals that discrimination persists -- and reiterates how hard it is to legislate decency and respect into people. On a related note, the New York state legislature has gone on the attack against home-sharing.
Nobody voting on the EU referendum will be able to argue that they misunderstood how they were voting. No hanging chads there.
Pew survey: 71% of US adults think it would be a career disadvantage not to have broadband at home
The Internet has more or less reached the status of public utility -- like water or electricity. Those without it are missing a fundamental, core piece of infrastructure of modern life.
June 24, 2016
Pebble promotes its new "Core" as an Amazon Alexa device
The Core is set to retail for $99, but the company is using a Kickstarter campaign to pre-fund, and will sell the miniature device to early backers for $79
Is the British vote to depart the EU a signal of a less-open world?
Quite possibly. There are many reasons that may have led to people voting either way on the referendum -- thoughtful Euroskeptics who voted to leave probably don't share a lot in common with nativists, and the people who voted to stay because the EU subsidizes their incomes probably don't have a lot in common with those who want to welcome more immigrants. But on balance, even though the EU is a bureaucratic juggernaut with structural flaws that probably doom it in the long run anyway, its diminishment does tend to push in the direction of a less-open world, and that does not portend well for the future.
Digital publisher says that Twitter engagement rates continue to decline
The co-founder of widely-read site The Next Web says they're seeing less and less click-through from links shared on Twitter, even when people are re-sharing their articles more than ever. The conclusion: People breeze past a headline, share it because they think it's supposed to be interesting, and then move on without actually reading it. That could certainly be trouble for Twitter, but it also suggests that social media is becoming a monster that eats itself. If the purpose is to show that you're sharing things (rather than experiencing or learning from them), then it's not a productive utility. And Twitter isn't the only site where this is happening. There is clearly sharing-for-show taking place on other platforms, like Facebook. That only tends to exacerbate tribalism (in the sociological sense) and identity politics, rather than making us better off.
June 25, 2016
FAA issues new rules on commercial drones
The Chicago Tribune has been Tronc'ed
No longer the Tribune Company, it's now "tronc", for "Tribune Online Content". A ridiculous brand name. In the long run, what will be interesting to see is how much they depend upon algorithms to generate news stories for coverage, in the same style as Netflix comes up with new programming based upon known user interests.
June 27, 2016
An app to help deter human trafficking (that is: sex slavery)
Taking photos of unoccupied hotel rooms can help with the prosecution of those who take advantage of their fellow human beings for exploitation
George Will resigns membership in the GOP
He says Donald Trump has infected the party and it is no longer behaving in a way that reflects his principles. And he declined to enter a catfight over the story because Trump "has an advantage on me because he can say everything he knows about any subject in 140 characters and I can't".
A remarkable look at the deflation in solar-power production costs
Costs have supposedly fallen by 80% since 2008
S&P drops UK's credit rating over EU departure
One thing is certain: The buying power of the pound versus the dollar has declined considerably in the wake of the "Brexit", so it's a fine time to be an American buyer in the hunt for British stocks.
The FAA's new commercial drone rules
Playing catch-up at this stage
June 28, 2016
"Russia has been engaged in an increasingly aggressive gray war across Europe"
American diplomats report harassment ranging from nuisances to criminality, executed by Russian agents. It goes well beyond the level of fraternity pranks.
Convenience stores, fresh food, and food stamps
The law of unintended consequences rears its ugly head
Sen. Bernie Sanders: Condescending, ungrateful, and uncooperative
He lost the race for the Democratic nomination, and he's making every signal that he wants to burn down the ship
A political typology of the United States in 2014
Probably not all that different from how it looks today -- and the fissures are showing. Our political parties are coalitions that form before the general election day...but they're not holding together very well in 2016.
What the "Brexit" from the EU means to Northern Ireland
One person's Twitter rant about the effects on the one part of the UK that will still have a land border with the EU after the UK leaves. It's sad, angry, and in a couple of cases vulgar -- but well-worth reading.
June 29, 2016
30-year-olds in 1975 versus that same cohort today
Today's 30-year-olds are better-educated, much less likely to have been married, vastly less likely to be living with a child, substantially less likely to be homeowners, and somewhat less likely to have achieved a middle-class income. Very interesting stuff.
Facebook changes news feed to favor people
The site is going to do whatever it takes to make sure that users visit as often as possible, for as long as possible. And if that means scaling back the amount of "publisher" content in favor of what individuals like and share, then that's what they're going to do. Woe unto any publisher that has built a business model off of social sharing, though -- which, anymore, is most of them.
A quick history of the $20 bill
Who belongs on the currency? Plenty of admirable people. There's room for Harriet Tubman there, too.
The robots are coming to take your jobs: The lawyerly edition
An "AI lawyer" is fighting tens of thousands of parking tickets and winning
Five Thirty-Eight forecasts overwhelming odds in favor of Hillary Clinton election
The former Secretary of State and Senator from New York may not be very popular, but she's running against someone whose celebrity is mainly based upon being a celebrity, and who cashed-in on his name by selling it to crooked licensees. As Benjamin Franklin sought to remind his contemporaries: Mind your business.
June 30, 2016
Rational government sounds much better than it would actually be in practice
Ironically, perhaps, the best evidence against a purely "evidence-based" government is the terrible misuse and abuse of "rational" arguments for terrible government behavior. Principles and ideas still matter.
(Video) Close your eyes and try not to picture Busta Rhymes
Americans are all over the place when it comes to self-driving cars
An overwhelming majority say in one survey that they're OK with autonomous cars -- yet there's all kinds of blowback to the news of a fatal crash involving an auto-piloted Tesla. Some crashes are inevitable, but if guardian-angel technology can keep us from getting into quite so many bad situations, then we'll all be much better off.
The most American-made cars are from Toyota and Honda
Contrary to what the nameplates might suggest, Japanese cars are often very American
"Progress" towards a sale of Yahoo's assets
This long, drawn-out process can't be doing anything to help morale