Gongol.com Archives: 2024 Third-Quarter Archives

Brian Gongol




July 2, 2024

Weather and Disasters Changing fortunes

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 Drought, though, has been replaced by catastrophic flooding; Spencer, Iowa, lost 1,000 homes to a flood that evolved basically out of nowhere.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




July 3, 2024

Weather and Disasters Beryl lands on Jamaica

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




July 4, 2024

The United States of America The luckiest child

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


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July 5, 2024

News Voters may be right to get bored

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





July 7, 2024

News A big year for better maps

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


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July 8, 2024

Computers and the Internet Puzzles and the AI future

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


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July 10, 2024

News Learn from the past without living there

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




July 11, 2024

News That's what friends are for

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

News Putting out the neighbor's fire

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




July 12, 2024

Business and Finance We're still learning about inflation

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






July 15, 2024

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





July 18, 2024

Business and Finance No place like an affordable home

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


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July 19, 2024

Computers and the Internet Rebooted off

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




July 20, 2024

News Sage advice

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


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July 21, 2024

News Which generation claims the Vice President?

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


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July 22, 2024

News Shortest primary in history

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

News America needs an NTSB clone for deaths involving police

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




July 23, 2024

Computers and the Internet After CrowdStrike

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


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July 24, 2024

News Not-war is not peace

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




July 25, 2024

Iowa Substantial layoffs at John Deere's plants in Iowa

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




July 26, 2024

Business and Finance

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

Computers and the Internet The paradox of digital publication

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




July 27, 2024

News Watching the Olympic Games

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




July 28, 2024

News Admitting defeat

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




July 29, 2024

Computers and the Internet

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




July 30, 2024

The United States of America Closing a church

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





August 1, 2024

News Practicing friends

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





August 3, 2024

News Schooling far away from home

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




August 4, 2024

News The wrong kind of unconditional love

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




August 5, 2024

Business and Finance The risk is digested when you buy

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

Water News Unwell water

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

Broadcasting Part of our world

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





August 7, 2024

Water News Give une hoot

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





August 9, 2024

Threats and Hazards Modern barbarity

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


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August 10, 2024

News On bended knee

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




August 11, 2024

Computers and the Internet Up with prudent skepticism, down with chronic cynicism

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




August 12, 2024

Broadcasting WCBS to be killed off

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




August 13, 2024

Iowa Hit the trail

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




August 14, 2024

Business and Finance The most important nearly-thankless job

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

Iowa QR codes to help those in need

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





August 16, 2024

Water News Energy to heal the water

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








August 21, 2024

News Echoes of Bob

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




August 22, 2024

The United States of America False certainty

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




August 23, 2024

News A time for quiet

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




August 24, 2024

News From the India Desk

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


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August 25, 2024

News Cats aren't the only curious ones

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




August 26, 2024

Business and Finance Brand-name nonsense is still nonsense

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

News Ukrainian machine gun vs. Russian missile

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

Business and Finance A century of progress

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

Iowa Call animal control

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





August 28, 2024

News Bad training kills valuable time

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





August 30, 2024

Threats and Hazards Rules, not gentlemen's agreements

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

Business and Finance It's not a work "family"

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




August 31, 2024

News We can do it

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





September 2, 2024

Business and Finance Labor and capital

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





September 4, 2024

Broadcasting Don't mine sympathy for clicks

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




September 5, 2024

News Speak the tongue, remember the decisions

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




September 6, 2024

Threats and Hazards

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

Computers and the Internet 3.4 years per hour

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






September 9, 2024

The United States of America Checking ourselves

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




September 10, 2024

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


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September 11, 2024

News A time for every name

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





September 13, 2024

Business and Finance Two plus two equals more

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




September 14, 2024

The United States of America Yesterday's city mouse; today's country mouse

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





September 16, 2024

News

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




September 17, 2024

Threats and Hazards

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




September 18, 2024

News Good elders and bad ones

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




September 19, 2024

Business and Finance

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




September 20, 2024

News Don't panic

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






September 23, 2024

Computers and the Internet Main character syndrome

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


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September 24, 2024

Broadcasting Art is in the constraints

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




September 25, 2024

Weather and Disasters

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




September 26, 2024

News The theater of readers

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




September 27, 2024

Computers and the Internet This excuse won't pass

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






September 30, 2024

Weather and Disasters Self-organization and reinsurance pools

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

Science and Technology Weed intelligence

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