Gongol.com Archives: 2018 Weekly Archives
May 6, 2018
A country of nearly 330,000,000 people surely has the capacity to accommodate 57,000 people without excessive strain. There's no need to be cruel -- which is how the revocation of "temporary protected status" for those Honduran immigrants really appears. They came to the United States after the devastation of Hurricane Mitch, and it shouldn't be seen as though the United States simply took on a deadweight of 57,000 people. By and large, people bring economic activity with them: If the border between Iowa and Minnesota were erased, the resulting "state" would have a much larger population, but the underlying economic activity would likely be more or less the same. The failure to understand this is deeply embedded in the conceit that immigrants "take" from the country to which they move. Kicking out the Hondurans really makes no sense at all. It's disruptive and hurtful.
When the tweet says something about Prince William, but the embedded ad appears to be a picture of an excited anthropomorphic pickle
When Putin's team doesn't want you to hold a rally
Doesn't really seem like there's a perfectly innocent explanation for this.
May 5, 2018
Show notes: Brian Gongol Show on WHO Radio - May 5, 2018
Tune in from 2pm to 4pm Central Time
If California were a country...
...it would have the world's 5th-largest economy. Shall we now impose tariffs on exports from California to the rest of the country? Those seem to be in vogue.
Stop posting your old phone number on the Internet
A meme going around Facebook asks "Who can still remember their childhood telephone number?". Predictably, people are posting their old numbers in the comments. There's no such thing as a "security" question when people are this gullible. If only people realized that half of the dumb things they share in response to these social-media memes are extremely useful to the types of bad actors who would use their personal information against them. It's bad enough already that it takes virtually no effort at all to crack certain "security" questions like "What was your mother's maiden name?".
May 4, 2018
Rudy Giuliani has issued a statement apparently intending to clarify that the President's payments to keep Stormy Daniels from talking to the media were "nothing but a family thing", to borrow a phrase (not his words, but definitely his meaning). Besides the fact that the timing of the payment makes it self-evident that this quite certainly wasn't just a family thing, its existence alone highlights a very real security risk: The President's behavior (past and present) and his obsession with image make him dangerously susceptible to blackmail. That is a national-security risk. Think just of the revelation that he scripted his own fitness report: If someone lies when literally nothing is at stake, what could possibly be expected of their truthfulness when there are consequences to be paid for being honest? But when a person lies so casually about things that are so inconsequential (other than to his image), that is a person who is perhaps uniquely subject to manipulation.
More control won't preserve authoritarianism -- it will only make the collapse worse
In response to an opinion piece by a Chinese legal scholar proclaiming the pending victory of China's "planned market economy", James Palmer, an editor at Foreign Policy, notes that "Chinese leaders believe -- wrongly -- that they can also use mass surveillance and AI to replace the necessity for openness in governance and freedom of speech and allow total control from the top." If one were looking to start a list of things that will cause massive anxiety and social unrest for the world in the intermediate-range future, one might start with this.
A creative -- if likely impractical -- approach to providing shelter in-place to those who lose their homes to natural disasters: Inflatable buildings that could be air-dropped into place and raised with helium. Good ideas, though, often emerge out of the seemingly impractical ones. And this particular idea highlights one of the big problems that comes back over and over with natural disasters: People need someplace safe to live and rest when their homes are lost. It's worth rubbing together a few brain cells to see if we can come up with better ways to do that.
Ending a 42-year police career
Police officer signs off after 42 years, and his daughter (a dispatcher) is the one who gets to acknowledge the final call.
Vaporizing 1,800 jobs out of spite
Should the threatened trade war of tariffs exchanged between the United States and China become a reality, one study estimates that Iowa would lose more than 1,800 jobs to the resulting inefficiencies.
May 3, 2018
The Boy Scouts of America announce their marketing plan to welcome girls to Cub Scouts (the full launch is later this year, but they report that 3,000 early adopters are already in). They're also changing the name of the program for older kids to "Scouting BSA" starting in February -- since the girls' track in the program is coming in 2019.
Spend no time defending the indefensible
Very well-put by David French: "We are not told to rationalize and justify sinful actions to preserve political influence or a popular audience."
Oops: "We recently identified a bug that stored passwords unmasked in an internal log."
A hotel opens in Chicago promising "elegance and refinement" in a "shared room" lodging model. Er...okay. But it's still a hostel.
Does anyone really know what's going on?
Noah Smith proposes as a basic model of the world that "Nobody knows what's going on, and everyone is trying as hard as they can." A better version of that might be modified to say that the people who are trying their hardest have the most humility about what they don't know. Overconfidence correlates with duty-shirking.
Netflix is fixing Season 4 of "Arrested Development"
Mitch Hurwitz is re-editing the season so that it's in the same chronological format as the rest of the series. Nice.
May 2, 2018
After saying that the President had reimbursed his lawyer for a $130,000 hush-money payment, Rudy Giuliani will probably be forced soon to "clarify" that Michael Cohen was "reimbursed indirectly" via his retainer -- as though a lawyer in Cohen's role acts like an all-you-can-eat buffet. The fact we have a President so susceptible to blackmail is a national-security risk.
A beautiful day at the Gateway Arch
St. Louis's signature monument really does make the city stand out
May 1, 2018
The physician whose name went on the medical "report" on candidate Trump says "He dictated that whole letter". To have reached this conclusion really didn't take a great deal of sophisticated textual analysis, but it's nice to have confirmation. The problem isn't just that the report itself was fabricated, it's that the patient insists so much on the fabrication. A person so compelled to lie and exaggerate about the smallest of things cannot be trusted in the big things. If someone lies when literally nothing is at stake, what could possibly be expected of their truthfulness when there are consequences to be paid for being honest?
"I'm not trying to act like I'm driving a garbage truck in Des Moines"
It's nauseating for these words to come from someone masquerading as a conservative leader. Real conservatives know that people should be judged by their character, not their occupation.
Police say don't try to chase the perpetrator in a hit-and-run accident. Just record everything you can.
Homeopathic "remedy" contains saliva from rabid dogs
Homeopathy is a great example of the kind of quackery that justifies some regulation of certain products in the interest of public health and safety. Because...rabid dog saliva, for the love of Salk.