Gongol.com Archives: April 2025
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April 2, 2025
One of the best ways to understand America's phenomenal prosperity is to see the United States as 50 smaller countries, all bound together by an enormous free-trade zone. Individual states can pick and choose their own taxes and regulations, of course, but exchanges among them are bound, by the Constitution, to a prevailing free-trade regime. ■ Under these circumstances, it's possible to identify certain surpluses and deficits that some states have with others. Iowa runs a substantial surplus in the production of pork, well beyond what it consumes. California has a big surplus in movies and television shows. Washington runs a considerable surplus with the other states in the production of passenger airplanes. Florida generates a one-of-a-kind and insurmountable surplus in Disney World vacations. ■ With free trade, the market nudges each state to specialize in the production of what comes easily to its comparative advantages. Nobody gets upset that Idaho doesn't produce a lot of oceangoing freighters or that Hawaii doesn't build a lot of snowblowers. And while some states are, on average, more prosperous than others, even the state with the lowest per-capita GDP is still competitive with a rich country like Canada. The big free-trade zone doesn't drag down the high performers, nor does it exploit the laggards -- it raises the economic condition of every state. ■ Without the Constitutional guarantee of interstate free trade, Iowa might try to box out Washington's airliner production with import taxes and subsidize its own. It might try to punish California by taxing Hollywood movies and create domestic protections to get people to visit Adventureland instead of EPCOT. But those wouldn't be good uses of anyone's money or efforts. Even if Georgia comes along and subsidizes TV and film production within its borders, Iowa should still stick to a few of the things it does best. ■ Taxes on imports (or tariffs) don't enrich society as a whole. They can line some well-connected pockets and maybe run cover for some industries in some places that aren't competitive on their own. But what they give to producers they take from consumers, all while distorting the choices that people would make by focusing on their comparative advantages. ■ The US economy has been a more than 200-year natural experiment in free trade -- we just don't often see it that way. But what free-flowing interstate trade has wrought is the most robust economy in the history of the world. To recognize the gains from trade, we only need to be smart enough to see the evidence right in front of our own eyes.
April 3, 2025
The state of one's starting assumptions can have an overwhelming effect on the conclusions one ends up drawing. If, for instance, one were to assume that American economic might reached a peak at some point during the heavy industrial era, then that assumption could easily frame the conclusion that some form of "return" to heavy industry might also bring about a "return" of economic glory. ■ But those assumptions would be faulty for two reasons. First, by any reasonable measure, there has been no peak in American economic success: It's grown from generation to generation. That doesn't mean the growth has been evenly distributed; some people, and even some geographic areas, have stagnated. Addressing that stagnation with a good underlying base of growth and some well-targeted policies could do a lot of good -- as could promoting conditions that encourage people to move to where the opportunity is. ■ The second fault in the assumptions would be to think that heavy industrial work is somehow infused with magic. Consider this under-appreciated fact: Roughly since the end of World War II, a majority of American workers have been employed in the service sector. Not just some, and not just a rising number. A majority. ■ This is a natural economic progression. Automation makes it easier to make things. That's been the case on the farm and in the factory alike. Machines do repetitive tasks well at scale, and the amazing productivity of the American agricultural and industrial sectors should be regarded as a massive success story. ■ Services, though, are much harder to automate. And in many cases, they can only be made so efficient: A string quartet doesn't get better by playing Brahms twice as fast or by cutting out the cello. There's only so much by which automation can make a haircut more efficient (otherwise, more people would be buying Flowbees). And if you want to talk to a counselor, your life will not be improved by them conducting sessions with two clients at a time. ■ It's natural, then, for employment in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors to decline, while the service sector expands. Finding ways to make prosperity reach more people in more places isn't a matter of trying to revive a fictitious past. It's a matter of dealing with the facts as they are, which means concentrating on matters like the dignity of work, life-long learning and skill development, and transitional assistance when old jobs fade and new ones need to be found. ■ America has been a majority-service-sector economy since the 1950s. Before that was the mobilization for a great war, and before that was a Great Depression. There are no glory days at any point in the last century when industrial employment led the way. Any assumption leading otherwise is a path to false promises.
April 4, 2025
Projections in the natural sciences have mainly been on a long upward trend towards greater accuracy. Weather forecasts are a shining example: The Storm Prediction Center has really been nailing their forecasts lately, in a way that would have been purely a dream half a century ago. ■ This has tended to give people the impression that anything that is quantifiable can be accurately projected. This confidence has been badly misapplied to the social sciences. Individual things can be well-known about topics within subjects like political science or economics, but a whole lot of macro-scale projections are still firmly within the grasp of fickle aspects of both individual psychology and group dynamics. ■ Anyone who makes confident, sweeping predictions about the economy should be viewed with overwhelming suspicion. There are far too many human-based variables involved for anyone to know with certainty how things will go. ■ Central to this is the knowledge that factors may line up in favor of a turn of events in one direction or another, but what we simply cannot know ahead of time are what timing and what triggers will be involved. This doesn't stop certain overconfident types from profiting by selling products like "market forecasts" -- but it should. ■ A sudden 10% downturn in the stock market has just resulted, ultimately, from the impulses of a single individual human being. There are those who saw the conditions coming together for what has happened, but nobody predicted outright what actually has come to pass. Humans remain the wildest of wild cards, and unless and until we perfect a great deal more of the psychological sciences, timing and triggers will remain the elusive aspects of every plausible economic forecast.
April 5, 2025
Wired reports that a White House-empowered team is planning a "hackathon" at the IRS in order to create an application programming interface (or API) to permit data to be moved more freely from one software system inside the tax agency to another. ■ There are very good reasons to be concerned about any large-scale effort to break down barriers that otherwise kept sensitive information (like taxpayer data) siloed and firewalled. Even in the best of circumstances, so much of that data is potentially so sensitive that it rises to the level where background checks, security clearances, and a whole lot of legal counsel ought to be involved. ■ But even if everything were to be conducted according to the strictest possible internal controls and safeguards, there is a bigger problem with the reported plan. A "hackathon" is a fine model to use when trying to assemble a group of smart, creative people in a single place to achieve a narrowly-defined goal. There are even charity hackathons that invite people with computer skills to donate their abilities to solve problems for public-benefit causes. ■ The IRS, though, maintains watch over one of the biggest troves of high-value sensitive personal data anywhere in the world. The Office of Personnel Management breach in 2015 and the cyberattack on Equifax in 2017 were huge. A successful breach of coordinated data at the IRS would be bigger than both events combined -- since nobody escapes the notice of the IRS. ■ The nature of a "hackathon" means that products -- perhaps incomplete, certainly not fully vetted -- will be tested, quite possibly on live data. And that means defenses will be lowered: At the very least, people whose job it is to watch for suspicious server activity will be expecting unusual activity to be taking place. There could be no more ideal time for an adversary to try to attack. ■ Just as Eisenhower took the weather into account when carrying out D-Day, a skilled cyber-adversary looks for exactly the kind of "hackathon" conditions that would offer cover for conducting their own operations. There is a time and a place for the "hackathon" approach -- but the servers and systems affecting every American taxpayer, in the days just prior to the deadline to file tax returns, is most certainly not it. ■ It's possible that the report is erroneous or flat-out wrong. It's also possible that something far more benign than a "hackathon" -- like a strategic planning meeting or a project kickoff -- is planned instead, and someone is using the wrong terms. But it's also possible, particularly based on what's happened at other Federal agencies, that "shock and awe" are indeed in the works.
JP Morgan says odd of global recession now 60%
The ingredients for trouble have been put into the bowl. Now we have to make sure nobody stirs the thing.
Yet another day of high weather danger
People in the Lower Mississippi Valley just can't catch a break from the severe weather right now. That's an extremely serious problem when National Weather Service offices are going badly under-staffed because of rash spending cuts.
April 6, 2025
Making air travel look glamorous again
Some people like to look at the promotional advertising of airline travel from the pre-deregulation era and imagine that all such travel was freshly-carved roast beef and ladies dressed in pearls. But to imagine that all air travel was that way is to surrender both to an ignorance of the facts (like the fact that airliners crashed much more often back then) and to the gauzy lens of marketing. ■ Someday, people might look at promotional videos for today's airline cabins and think that everything we experience is equally glamorous. We know that it's often much grittier than plush seats and private "suites" -- even if those are the experience for some, they're not exactly representative of the travel experience for most people, most of the time. But those are the artifacts that are likely to survive into the future. ■ It's a great illustration of a much broader picture: Just because you see or read something from the past doesn't mean that you're getting the whole story. Even when it's authentic documentation, there's always a form of selection bias about what is kept long enough to be seen in the future. ■ Photos are often staged or selectively taken. The people whose stories get told rarely reflect a true cross-section of public experience -- most people didn't get to fly aboard Pan Am "Clipper Ships". And what we see on the surface doesn't necessarily tell the important facts of the tale -- like deadly crashes, frequent hijackings, and in-flight smoking. ■ The study of history is extremely important. Without it, we are prone to making the same stupid mistakes over and over and over again. But that study needs to be performed with a critical eye and a healthy skepticism. What's missing from the historical record is often just as important as what we can see. Those who only see things from the past and want their "golden ages" back are often the most easily duped of all.
Trillions in paper wealth destroyed
Something like $5 trillion in stock market valuation has gone up in smoke because one person is obsessed with tariffs and a completely fictitious notion of what was or is good for the American economy. There's nothing more substantial to it. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution says taxes are the job of Congress, and that includes import taxes (which is all tariffs are). A self-respecting institution would assert its authority over those taxes instantly. Government must be limited in order to be good, and letting the wrong branch of government do whatever it wants is not "limited".
Abducted 17-year-old rescued at Omaha truck stop
A truck-driving couple thought something seemed wrong, so they dug deeper and identified a criminal incident in progress
April 9, 2025
As measles outbreaks continue to spread in places like Texas and Ohio, what should be unthinkable has become the tragic reality: At least three people, including two children, have died of a disease so utterly preventable that it was thought to have been eradicated 25 years ago. ■ The persistence of a pernicious anti-vaccination movement is in no small part to blame: MMR vaccination rates among school-aged children have dropped to 92.7%, and the Texas outbreak is spreading almost exclusively among the unvaccinated. But, as a root cause, a fundamental problem about self-understanding shares at least a fraction of the blame, as well. ■ Every human being is unique. We are constructed out of both nature and nurture, and the combination makes everyone different. This uniqueness is, paradoxically, the thing we can all be certain that we share -- no two of us are the same, which creates a foundation for celebrating both our similarities and our differences. To be human is to be unique. We all are. ■ We can also be special, though being special is different from being unique. To be special is a relational experience: One can be special to a grandparent, a teacher, or a minister, for example. One can also be special for a time -- like being the center of attention on a birthday. Most everyone is special to someone, somewhere, sometimes, but it's different from being unique; being special naturally ebbs and flows, depending upon who is around to express it. ■ And then, a person can be exceptional. The exceptional person is different -- so different that we make exceptions for them to the ordinary rules and customs. The exceptional person is, in some way, set apart from everyone else because their difference overwhelms society's capacity to make ordinary way for them. ■ These three definitions -- unique, special, and exceptional -- have been confused for one another far too much for our own good. Everyone is unique, and most everybody is special to at least someone out there. But there are those who are unsatisfied with being unique and unfulfilled by how special they feel, so they insist on being treated exceptionally. Some people truly are exceptional, of course, but a lot of people try to feel unique or special by forcing others to treat them as exceptions. ■ Strident anti-vaccination behavior often falls into this category. There certainly are those who have real immune complications that make them authentic exceptions: They cannot be safely vaccinated, and their safety depends upon everyone else getting vaccinated so that herd immunity can shield them. ■ But others reject the obvious best practices at both the individual and community levels and refuse remarkably safe, effective, and well-established vaccines. Many seem to do so merely because claiming a right to act in an "exceptional" way appears to scratch an emotional itch for them that being "unique" or "special" does not. That impulse is turning out to have dire consequences for children, and it needs to be turned back.
April 10, 2025
TechCrunch claims to have a scoop on photos that document an electric pickup truck from Slate Auto seen in the wild, witnessed on a flatbed in Los Angeles. What is attention-grabbing about the discovery isn't the vehicle's styling, but rather the expected price. Slate is reportedly on a mission to make a $25,000 EV truck. ■ That would be a fascinating and worthwhile goal, if true. Ford, the biggest truck-maker in the country, is proud of turning its massively popular F-150 into the F-150 Lightning -- with a starting price of $62,995. ■ Technologies that cross over from premium products to mainstream sellers and even low-cost leaders are the ones that really create useful change. It's no secret that Americans drive trucks out of proportion to their actual utility: The cab-to-bed ratio is basically the inverse today of what it was even into the 1970s. Meanwhile, many of the best-selling truck models have gotten obscenely tall -- too tall for drivers to see pedestrians, increasingly deadly even at lower speeds, and too tall to make them cargo-friendly. ■ A product that could both shrink the pickup truck's physical profile and come in at a price point competitive with even some of the most modestly-priced cars out there would be a double benefit to society. And if it could displace rival vehicles that create more air pollution, that would be a significant victory, too. The futurist ID Pearson once noted, "If we want a world where everyone can have a good lifestyle, we need to accept and even encourage rapid obsolescence, driving the technology quickly towards low environmental impact." An electric truck at the price of a Kia sedan would very much fit the bill.
April 11, 2025
For the last full budget year, the Federal government spent all $4.92 trillion it brought in, and borrowed an additional $1.83 trillion to cover spending over and above taxes and other revenues. All of the accumulated deficits, plus interest, bring us up to a total of $36.2 trillion in debt. It's a sum far too large for anyone to really comprehend -- even divided among a population of 341 million people, it's nearly $106,000 per person. ■ Changes to the rate of interest we pay on that debt are hugely consequential. And the interest rate on long-term loans to the US Treasury went from 4.42% on April 4th to 4.90% on April 11th. ■ It's hard to see that kind of a change -- an increase of more than 11% in a week -- outside of the context of disruption to the world trading economy in which it happened. Uncertainty is expensive, and there's no better place to see the cost of uncertainty than in the change in interest rates. ■ Comparisons from day to day or week to week might sometimes be misleading -- lots of factors affect supply and demand on a daily basis. But there are signs that confidence in the Treasury has taken a durable hit. Chances seem good that rates will still be elevated 90 or 180 days from now. ■ And if the prevailing uncertainty means we are going to pay interest rates on our debt that are half a percentage point higher (or more) than what we were paying before, then the pain is going to be around for a long time to come. Interest on the debt is already more than 10% of all Federal spending. Higher interest rates will make those costs larger. ■ Taken together, what we spend on priorities that really can't be cut (like Social Security, Medicare, and interest) amount to nearly half of our spending. This means we don't have a lot of options to soften the blow on the spending side. There's only one other side of the equation where change is possible, and that's on the revenue side: Higher taxes. And in an environment where higher government interest rates push up interest rates on private citizens, too, a lot of people will find themselves paying more, twice over.
April 12, 2025
Go back in time to just before Y2K, and you encounter a time when it was possible to register just about anything as a domain name -- the gold rush was just beginning. But it cost $119 to register a domain name with Network Solutions, with a hard limit of 26 characters (including the top-level domain). So the temptation to register and squat on desirable names was high, but it was tempered a bit by the up-front cost. ■ But as enthusiasm for the Internet grew, people who might have previously squatted on a domain name to capture something like "pets.com" before selling it to others found that it could also be lucrative to squat on typo names, too -- like "ptes.com". Google (itself a website with a funny name) was only starting to emerge, so a lot could be gained from catching human beings making wrong guesses. ■ Fast-forward to today, and people are surrendering their thinking processes to artificial intelligence everywhere you look. Some of it just means jumping on the latest fads, like generating your action-figure avatar. But many others are using AI as a surrogate for more serious processes, like writing computer code. ■ Coding can often be tedious, so resources have emerged to make developers' lives easier -- resources like code repositories, where libraries of existing code can be copied, pasted, stored, modified, and retrieved. This is a great system if everyone involved can be trusted. But developers are using artificial intelligence tools to help generate new code, and artificial intelligence has a serious problem with hallucinations -- nonexistent things the AI "imagines" because of the way its predictive nature behaves. ■ There's a real hazard in this development, because code-generating AI is hallucinating the existence of nonexistent code packages. That's bad enough, because it produces programs that don't work. But just as typosquatters came for domain names with bad intentions in mind, now crooked parties are putting malicious software in the destinations where AI has been hallucinating the existence of code packages. So when the AI-written code goes looking for real code in a library that doesn't exist, it ends up finding malware instead. ■ The first thing any security-minded person should do when a technology is deployed in a new field is to imagine the ways in which it could be abused. It won't necessarily stop the abuse from happening, but it might at least begin to raise red flags around the circumstances where we need to apply more careful, cautious thought. We've known for more than a quarter-century that people looking for the right things in the wrong places could end up in dangerous territory. Now we need to realize that AI "helpers" may be just as prone to looking in the wrong spots as the humans they're supposedly assisting.
April 13, 2025
The Financial Times has put a spotlight on a curious paradox: some 80% of Americans seem to think that the country "would be better off if more Americans worked in manufacturing", while only 26% of people currently working outside the manufacturing sector believe that they, personally, would be better off working in manufacturing. The numbers come from a 2024 survey by the Cato Institute. ■ Things never seem to go particularly well when Americans start trying to think of ways to tell one another what to do without committing themselves to doing the same. The mythical beliefs around manufacturing jobs are a flagship example. ■ If we want to make people in 2025 economically better off, then we need to base our priorities and policy-making on 2025 realities rather than the imaginary world of 1955. There are great jobs available in manufacturing today, to be sure. But they are not for losers or the lazy; the good manufacturing jobs belong to people who can adapt and learn at work. Creativity and problem-solving are high-reward activities on the shop floor just like they are in an architectural firm. ■ But having an advanced economy means having a lot of workers in the service sector -- the ratio is roughly seven service-sector workers to one manufacturing-sector worker. One isn't better than the other, but one vastly outnumbers the other. ■ Good policies have to reflect that ratio, rather than ignoring it. The preponderance of job-training and job-development efforts should focus on the service sector, because that's where the work is -- and we have 75 years of data saying that's where the work is going to stay.
April 16, 2025
Personal safety shouldn't be threatened
The attempt to kill Pennsylvania's governor by throwing Molotov cocktails into the governor's residence deserves the most widespread condemnation that Americans can offer. The attacker's motivations appear to have been political, which causes the incident to meet the strict definition of terrorism: Violence committed with the intention of achieving a political outcome. ■ Engaging in politics can certainly come with a variety of risks. Plainly, a person who engages in politics runs a reputational risk: In seeking office, one puts their good name out to be judged by other people. What is said and done both in campaigning and, for the victors, in governing, can come back to either enhance or diminish the standing of that good name. ■ Related to that reputational risk, a politician invariably runs an income and occupational risk. If one runs for a full-time job with a full-time effort and falls short on election day, then the day after election day can be the first day of unemployment. That is risk enough to keep many people from even contemplating a run for office. ■ But no pursuit of office or term of service should bring with it a real risk to life and limb. There are far more than enough factors already discouraging decent people from running for office as it is. A sober concern for the safety of self and family shouldn't need to be layered on top of them.
April 17, 2025
For what seemed like the longest of times, to have an Apple computer was to think oneself impervious to cyberatttack. It was a fair enough assumption; Windows computers were much more susceptible for a variety of reasons related to their operating system architecture. ■ The resulting hazard, though, was that many Apple users took no interest in security issues and left themselves vulnerable by their sense of impunity. The recent discovery of sophisticated attacks that could compromise Apple devices illustrates the danger of over-confidence. ■ We know of the Apple vulnerabilities because they were documented by the CVE program, which provides a common clearinghouse for monitoring major computing vulnerabilities. It's a program whose very existence has come under attack, and even though it looks like the status quo will prevail for now, the scramble to establish a durable institution to house that research indefinitely is underway. ■ Having well-coordinated research and surveillance programs for cybersecurity vulnerabilties is one of the best large-scale steps a society can adopt. America's problem right now appears to be that not everyone realizes just how consequential these vulnerabilities can be and just how important a steady hand can be in the face of gray-zone threats. ■ Whoever imagined that cuts to the CVE program would be worthwhile "savings" is a person not to be taken seriously.
April 18, 2025
Projections currently in circulation indicate that four giant American tech firms will, altogether, spend $320 billion just this year on computing resources related to artificial intelligence. China-based companies and others are out to spend tens of billions more. Perhaps not since the Y2K crisis has so much money been spent on a single computing goal. ■ There is lots of reason to be optimistic about some of the potential found in neural networks and machine learning, but any time there is such an evident arms race underway, it's worth taking a step back to make sure that sound principles are going to prevail. One such area where there ought to be lots of cause for alarm is in the basic framework being used to build these computing systems. ■ The promise of artificial intelligence, beyond in performing impressive visual stunts, is that it could be used to enhance and improve upon human decision-making. That's why, for instance, it has lots of appeal in medical research. But if, in essence, the premise of artificial intelligence is that it does very well with pattern recognition and predictions, then it is improbable that it will give us especially good anti-worst-case reasoning. ■ It's one thing to be very good at seeing patterns in the data sets that are present. But life is often a matter of avoiding the worst possible outcomes and steering clear of unlikely but awful events. Doing that well requires a combination of moral imagination and a tolerance for improbability. Always making the best decision is less important than being sure to avoid colossal mistakes. ■ But with it emerging that some people are willing to trust artificial intelligence with extremely high-impact decisions, we need to think carefully about the consequences of overconfidence. It's one problem if Google tells people to put glue on their pizzas. ■ It's a much bigger problem if AI is being asked to enact policies (or even write laws) that have enormous effects on people's lives without a due procedural regard for the simple question, "What's the worst that could happen, and how are we insuring prudently against it?" ■ That just isn't the strong suit of a computing philosophy that assumes the only thing standing in the way of getting answers right is a shortage of data. Catastrophes averted rarely show up in the data. That creates an enormous systemic blind spot which we might never expect artificial intelligence to see.
April 19, 2025
$28 million and what to show for it?
Some of the tallest and most recognizable private structures in Iowa City will be sold at a sheriff's auction after the developer behind them defaulted on some $28 million in loans. It's certainly not what city officials had in mind when they backed some of the developments with millions of dollars in TIF financing. ■ Iowa City is unusual in that its downtown really is the University of Iowa, the school has been effectively landlocked as enrollment has grown and the city's population has grown by even more. These factors make the real estate surrounding the campus disproportionately valuable and create economic incentives to build taller buildings than would normally be found in a city of 75,000 people. ■ But, as ever, the risk is higher with large individual projects than it would be when spread across a larger number of smaller individual developments. Cities are forever falling in love with blue-sky promises of tall, eye-catching buildings. While the allure is understandable, it's also nothing new for big dreams to fall flat. ■ Even though the city says it is not on the hook for any bad debts, it's a good reminder that picking winners is extremely hard to do right -- and public programs are very rarely equipped to do so better than the banks and credit unions with real risk capital on the line. Just because something looks nifty in the architectural drawings doesn't mean it's going to work out profitably once the walls go up.
April 20, 2025
People aren't production targets
The extraordinary (and bizarre) fascination that the world's present-richest man seems to have with high-volume procreation has raised all kinds of strange issues of paternal responsibility and bewildering suggestions of abandonment. ■ The situation also puts an important value judgment about parenthood in the spotlight. It's undoubtedly better to bring a small number of children into the world and furnish them with an abundance of love and affection than to approach them as outputs to be maximized. The psychotherapist Philippa Perry put it sagely: "[Y]ou are creating a person to love, not a work of art." ■ That verb, "creating", is widely imbued with a sense of meaning that reaches into the spiritual. Even for those who do not observe any particular religious or spiritual practices, "creating" is still a much better word than "making". It suggests an intentionality that may not always be true, but which deserves the presumption nevertheless. ■ A due respect for the dignity of each individual life requires treating people -- even the tiniest newborn -- as a complete person, entitled to the full array of human rights and liberties that belong to all others. Treating births as some kind of production target to be maximized undermines that presumption of dignity.
April 21, 2025
Pope Francis and movement in the right direction
Anyone who has given the matter any serious consideration can certainly come up with some way in which Pope Francis disappointed them in his time as Pontiff. It comes with the territory; the Pope, whoever he might be, is one of the world's most prominent voices on moral questions, and yet he remains a human being. It creates a tension between the aspiration towards the divine and the fallibility of human nature that inescapably highlights the shortcomings more than for almost anyone else on Earth. ■ With the Pope, as with any other person, we are best served by assessing their direction rather than their destination. The question that counts is not, "Did he manage to perfect the Catholic Church?", for that is an unattainable goal. If humans are involved, it cannot be perfected. ■ The question that does count is, "Was he moving in a good direction?". Francis himself offered a gentle test of self-assessment in this regard in his encyclical, "Fratelli Tutti": "Each day we have to decide whether to be Good Samaritans or indifferent bystanders." ■ One doesn't need to be Catholic, Christian, or even religious at all to appreciate that the parable of the Good Samaritan is about making a right choice in light of the circumstances before you, knowing that the circumstances will change with each step along the path. ■ The Good Samaritan doesn't make things perfect, but he does right by the victim he discovers in the moment, makes a provision to continue the victim's care, and promises to look in on the victim again when he returns. He makes a series of choices in pursuit of doing right, which is better than remaining indifferent. ■ Pope Francis was never going to be perfect, nor was he going to make every right choice. But he made a number of prominent choices that were visible, important, and directionally right. Over the last 12 years, the world could have done far worse.
April 24, 2025
In commerce as well as in statecraft, deterrence can be much cheaper than conflict. Convince your rivals that they don't have the wherewithal to take you on, and you may not have to engage with them at all. One prominent way to advertise plans for deterrence is to talk openly about how much planning has been done or what preparations have already been made. ■ China has long profited from the belief that its government operates according to a 100-year plan. Prominent people have fallen for the myth time and time again, and it's quite the tool of psychological leverage. ■ However useful it may be, the 100-year plan is a false myth, easily disproven by the colossal failure that was China's One Child policy. Introduced in 1979, ruthlessly enforced, relaxed in 2013, repealed in 2015, and then replaced by active encouragement to have children today. It was a policy that defied even basic arithmetic, and one that any team looking just five or ten years ahead could have seen going awry. ■ China's government doesn't have a 100-year plan, it merely has the myth of one. Even if it tried to observe such a plan, the exercise would be for naught. In Dwight Eisenhower's words, "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything." ■ The act of thinking through a course of action is of enormous value, but feedback is what keeps "planning" from becoming a calcified plan. A free market works because pricing is a giant feedback mechanism that tells planners what to change. Democratic voting acts the same way. It's clear those feedback mechanisms are unwelcome under Communist control. There is much good to be said for a long-term perspective, but it's only a mirage if it doesn't open its eyes and ears to respond to reality.
April 25, 2025
With more words at our disposal than is the case for almost any other language, it's generally a shame and an unforced error when someone says something in English but fails to use a precise word. The public consciousness is crowded with talk about "factory jobs" right now, but it's largely a misuse of the language to describe what people are actually seeking. ■ To be more precise, what most people want aren't really jobs on an assembly line. What they want are jobs that are dignified, and the distinction is important. ■ Work itself is inherently a pursuit of dignity: One exchanges their time and effort in return for compensation. But there are several layers of dignity embedded in the exchange. ■ People crave a sense of usefulness. It is dignified to be needed by other people. Nobody wants to feel disposable. ■ People also tend to seek opportunities to solve problems. We didn't get to be apex predators by our size or brute strength. We got there by outsmarting and out-persisting our prey. That same instinct needs to be satisfied through on-the-job use of our knack for puzzles and problem-solving. If the only stimulation a working person's mind gets is playing a game of Sudoku or finishing a crossword puzzle, then their job isn't landing them in front of enough opportunities to solve problems. ■ And people need to feel like they've been compensated fairly. The best way to get there is by maximizing the gap between a job's compensation and what the worker gives up to get it. Compensation can take non-money forms, of course; lots of work comes with social status or respect, or it is rewarded with gratitude from a customer or client well-served. The key is to get the input and output lines as far apart as possible. ■ Preemptively focusing policies on a specific type of work (like hourly factory line jobs) rather than on the factors people are really pursuing is a mistake we should be alert not to make. Dignified work looks a little bit different for everyone.
April 26, 2025
Technological change has a way of bending the mind of a certain kind of techno-enthusiast -- such that they see only how the new development will replace what came before it, rather than existing side-by-side with the old. Prudence dictates that we beware of such forecasts, even when they come from people who appear emphatic. Take, for example, Elon Musk's confident assertion that "Crewed aircraft will be destroyed instantly by cheap drone swarms". ■ It's a sweeping prediction, and one that flies in the face of the history of warfare. Perhaps the only thing that has ever really made a warfighting technology permanently obsolete is a change in propulsion. Ships once went to sea under sails, then coal-powered boilers, then diesel engines, and then (for some) nuclear power. Yet even then, sometimes what's old is new again. ■ While old propulsion may be permanently displaced by new, basically everything else simply adapts to the presence of new technologies, including drones. There's no doubt that Ukraine has revolutionized drone warfare as it seeks to repel the Russian invasion, but that doesn't mean fighter jets themselves are obsolete. "Destroyed instantly"? Certainly not. ■ It's dangerous to make plans under assumptions of obsolescence that do not match reality. Even soldiers on horseback sometimes make the difference in combat, even today. Blind faith in what's new can be just as hazardous as a rigid adherence to the old. What matters is seeing the whole scope and using any and all of the appropriate tools available to settle the matter at hand. In the words of Dwight Eisenhower, "The trained American possesses qualities that are almost unique. Because of his initiative and resourcefulness, his adaptability to change and his readiness to resort to expedient, he becomes, when he has attained a proficiency in all the normal techniques of battle, a most formidable soldier." Limber minds are what win in the long run.
April 27, 2025
The Storm Prediction Service, one of many enormously valuable components of NOAA, has sounded the alarm in a most serious way about the prospect of a dangerous tornado outbreak that could materialize in the Midwest on April 28th. Their forecasts have been flagging the event for days, and local meteorologists have been amplifying the message despite idiotic and occasionally nasty public feedback. ■ Something dramatic is quite likely to occur, but some people in the alerted regions will experience it and others won't. Then the painfully predictable complaints will ensue: "Why did you get us so worked up about this thing that didn't happen [to me, even though it still happened near me]?" ■ A cultural value we have plainly done not enough to cultivate is an appreciation for the bad things that don't happen. Modern, advanced civilization does a great deal to shield us from horrors that were utterly commonplace in days gone by. There was a time, not long ago, when tornado forecasts were practically unheard-of, and even warnings of verifiable events happening in real time were haphazard and poorly disseminated. ■ It's not just the case with weather, either: Go back to 1850, and well over 20% of deaths in the US were attributable to contaminated drinking water, a problem given next to no public thought today. We fixed the problem, and now bad things don't happen -- but nobody's counting. Likewise, routine childhood vaccinations have likely saved more than a million young lives in the last 30 years -- but it's hard to give anyone credit for the bad thing that didn't happen. ■ This is a cultural problem worthy of some attention, because some people are insistent on touching the hot stove. In our midst, we have vaccine fabulists, "raw water" advocates, and jerks profiting off fictitious weather forecasts on social media. All of them undermine work being done by responsible professionals. ■ There isn't enough time in the world to explain to everyone why every safety practice or prevention step has emerged over time. Even if time weren't a factor, audiences rarely have the patience to listen -- and the least patient are the ones who need to hear those messages the most. ■ It's truly a matter of establishing and enforcing cultural norms around professionalism: Good professions must police themselves scrupulously, and the rest of us amateurs need to heed what they tell us. Their successes will often take the form of bad things that don't happen (to wit: people not dying of vaccine-preventable diseases, of waterborne diseases like cholera and typhoid, or of injuries from surprise storms) -- but the last thing we should do is assume that those disasters avoided don't count for something good.
April 29, 2025
Computing and conceptual cul-de-sacs
Many, if not most, people are familiar with the phrase "Garbage in, garbage out", which is an idea that has guided computer programming since its mechanical origins. People tend to be much less familiar with another principle which deserves equal notoriety: That all computer coding embeds human assumptions and values, even if we aren't aware of it. "Beware algorithmic bias", unfortunately, isn't quite as catchy as "GIGO". ■ California Governor Gavin Newsom has announced statewide plans to put generative artificial intelligence ("Gen AI") to work within state government. In particular, he seeks fanfare for wanting Gen AI to help fix traffic congestion in the notoriously traffic-heavy state. ■ This, regrettably, sets up a case study in the problem of assuming that we just need to get the code right in order for all of our problems to be solved. It's possible, of course, that data analysis and clever algorithms might shave off a few minutes of travel time on the margins. But the fundamental problem in places like Los Angeles is that California has a deeply-embedded car culture and even the most obvious places for good mass transit options to be delivered (like Dodger Stadium) are still effectively designed to be hostile to pedestrians. ■ There is no way for artificial intelligence to conclusively resolve the underlying problem, and any assumption that it can is an assumption that stands in the way of making things better. Induced demand, or the new traffic that shows up to fill new lanes of roads, only compounds the issue. Suppose AI really could make car commutes faster -- that would only encourage more people to commute by car. ■ Technology can do ever so many things to make life easier, better, and safer. But it can't overcome human judgment, particularly if we use technology to mask bad assumptions and values with perverse consequences. We have to be willing to admit that we need to critique our own basic principles before hoping that a computer will program its way out of a conceptual cul-de-sac.