Gongol.com Archives: November 2025
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November 1, 2025
The ghosts and skeletons of Halloween decorations are fairly far removed from the religious connotations of All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day. Yet the connection between Halloween as a vigil and the religious observance acknowledging the dead is still in place. It's hard to name any religion that doesn't have at least some ritualized commemoration of the departed, and for good reason: We have in common everywhere that we don't know with intellectual certainty what happens after death. ■ Pascal's wager famously invites the reader to wager on the existence of God, using the consequences of the afterlife as the measurement of whether one wins or loses. But it's possible to approach the afterlife in a much more straightforward way without requiring any wager over the matter of a deity. ■ Step one is to assume that there is a chance greater than zero that there is some form of consciousness that exists apart from what we can confidently explain through the known physical mechanisms alone. Trees are alive and rocks are not. Animals, like trees, are alive, but are conscious in a way that trees are not (at least as far as we can tell). Humans, among the animals, have a particularly complex form of consciousness that exceeds what we see in a goldfish. ■ Something led from a world of rocks and minerals and gases to one in which humans are sentient. Whatever caused that consciousness to emerge still lies outside the obvious, and if we don't know exactly where it comes from, then we should at least maintain some modesty about claiming to know where it goes. A bit like dark matter, we only have a vague understanding of why or how consciousness even exists, so we certainly don't know enough to say with confidence how (or even whether) it is created or destroyed. ■ Step two is to consider the possibility that certain types of information seem to have no limitations or boundaries in space or time. The law of gravity is always in force, everywhere, and doesn't change. ■ What causes that law to be enforced everywhere? For that matter, what forces 2 + 2 to equal 4, everywhere and always within the universe? Does information itself, in a sense, travel without limitations? It's a question for philosophical speculation as much as science. ■ When those two steps are considered together, one possibility emerges that says some form of consciousness (call it a soul or a spirit) might survive even after physical death. If we don't know how sentience got into any of us individually or into humans as a species, then we don't really know if or how it might leave. In the grand scheme of things, it's not only strange that we're here, it's strange that we know we're here. ■ Moreover, quantum physics holds that information is neither created nor destroyed. If that's the case, then it's possible to hypothesize that consciousness just might go on to exist after the death of a physical body -- and that it might have no knowable boundaries in either space or time. ■ While none of this stands as anything close to proof, it does admit the possibility that something like an afterlife could not only occur, but could be fully and indefinitely aware of the consequences of choices made during life. Forget any religious picture of Heaven or Hell; imagine the possibility of infinite awareness of the consequences of all of your actions. If taken seriously, it's enough to make one think more than twice about doing wrong.
(Video) Police vehicle responding to an emergency collides with sheriff's vehicle on the same road, and it's caught on camera
November 2, 2025
Considering the devastation wrought by Hurricane Melissa as it crossed Jamaica, it's not particularly surprising that the event has revived a small debate about whether to add a special "Category 6" to the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale. Big events measured by an open-ended scale certainly open the door to further examination. ■ But adding a Category 6 to the mix would almost certainly represent a counterproductive form of mission creep. The Saffir-Simpson scale is somewhat subjective as it is, having been introduced in 1973, before today's very good tools for measuring other values with precision had matured for the purpose. We now can measure values like wind speed, barometric pressure drop, and storm surge with a reasonably high degree of confidence. ■ The value of the existing scale and its category ratings is mainly prospective: That is, "There's a Category 5 hurricane coming! Evacuate now!" is meant to convey actionable information to the people in the storm's path. We have detailed projections of the damage that could occur at each level of wind speed. ■ For truly informative purposes on a scientific basis (including insurance and government policy-making), the actual data (including wind speeds, but not limited to them) matters more. Anyone who chooses not to act in the presence of a Category 5 storm is unlikely to be motivated by calling it a Category 6. And for everybody else, what matters is the actual data.
November 5, 2025
It's often said that things happen in threes, but whatever limited truth of that is found elsewhere, it's rarely the case when it comes to employment. In that case, once you start to hear of layoffs, expect to hear about them far more than three at a time. ■ IBM just announced that "we are executing an action that will impact a low single-digit percentage of our global workforce" -- a wildly obfuscatory way of saying "We are about to lay off thousands of people". Target just laid off 1,000 while eliminating 800 open jobs. Amazon says that artificial intelligence is "transforming" 14,000 people out of work. ■ It's not that any of the plans themselves are new. But big companies tend to respond to some of the very same factors and events (both in macroeconomics and in the news), and when there's a lot of other bad news going on (like the longest Federal government shutdown in history), that may well provide a common trigger to act. Better to be the third-worst story in the news than the worst. ■ Big waves of layoffs are never a welcomed sign, and though the health of an economy always depends on more than just the number of jobs being created or lost, it can't be overlooked that two-thirds of the US economy is made up of consumer spending. High incomes mean more spending, and people who lose their jobs (and spend less as a result) end up having spillover effects on other parts of the economy as they cut back. ■ It seems likely that there are other layoff announcements soon to come out, if for no other reasons but macroeconomic circumstances and public-relations timing. Nobody wants to be the last employer to this particularly unpleasant party.
November 6, 2025
Password length beats complexity
It's pretty easy to point and laugh at the sheer laziness of using "Louvre" as the password to access the security cameras at the Louvre. But the daring robbery at the world's most famous museum of art raises two cybersecurity issues that ought to get more public attention. ■ First, the common misconception that a password like "m0mA!" would have been adequately secure. Sure, it might have been slightly more secure than "Louvre", but the fact is that password requirements built on complexity (e.g., one capital letter, one lowercase letter, one numeral, one symbol) end up leading people to make short and somewhat predictable choices (turning the letter "O" into a zero is about as obvious as it gets). ■ Predictability is what gets you hacked. Much better are long passwords, even without the weird symbolic requirements. By sheer math alone, "You will not break into the camera system at the Louvre" would have been a superior choice of passphrase -- length beats complexity. ■ Second, the Louvre incident is a cautionary reminder that cybersecurity and physical security are inseparable from one another. A cybersecurity compromise can enable a physical-world attack. A breach in the physical environment can lead to a cyberattack. ■ Too often, we think of digital attacks as though they exist on a separate plane from the tangible world, but in reality, defensive thinking in either realm must go beyond preconcieved boundaries and account for applicability to the other. No amount of password management will stop an oversized stair car backed up to an unlocked window.
November 7, 2025
With the Federal government still in a shutdown, the FAA is having trouble staffing its air traffic control centers. The order to cut air traffic by 10% at 40 of the country's biggest airports, from Anchorage to Tampa, has already caused more than a thousand flight cancellations, and it just took effect. ■ America is unique in many ways, not least of which is the idea that people are free to travel anywhere in a continental-sized nation whenever they like. That's not the case in China or Russia. ■ The United States is also unique in that our population density is a fraction of that in countries we tend to regard as peers and near-peers: Germany is 6.5 times as dense; the UK, 7.6; and Japan, 9.2. In South Korea, there are 14.3 times as many people per square mile as there are in the US. That makes us unusually dependent upon airplanes for long-distance travel -- we're spread too far apart for the alternatives. ■ Culturally, we do love road trips, but their practicality for business travel evaporates rather quickly: Even with the speed and ease of Interstate highways, it's still hard to justify the highway for destinations more than about 500 to 750 miles away (depending on driver tolerance). And as a country with a whole lot of winter weather and strong thunderstorms, road travel is often limited at the same times air travel is delayed. ■ High-speed rail, which remains the dream of countless enthusiasts, could be massively useful if enough technological innovations could be layered to reduce the construction costs, achieve all-weather reliability, and move fast and frequently enough to make sense for interstate travel across entire regions of the country.
The one-two punch to make rail travel work in America (if it ever will again) really does have to be the combination of very high speeds (at least three times faster than highway travel) and impeccable reliability in all weather conditions. That probably means the only real solution is an extremely fast suspension railway -- something that could be constructed without any travel at grade (for safety) and with the actual rail surface sheltered from weather conditions (meaning the trains could run in ice, snow, rain, or wind that can ground air travel). ■ A German installation of this type has support pillars spread about 100' apart, which could theoretically allow a system to be built within the easements for existing Interstate highways. Compared with conventional rails, suspended rails are extremely compact on the ground: They can go in the airspace right over the highway. If it works in high-density Japan, surely it can work within existing land already set aside for American highways. ■ Moreover, with supports typically spaced about 100' apart, suspended rail systems have the capacity to overcome difficult terrain in much the same way that high-voltage power lines do. (Which is also a good place to note that a suspended rail system would almost certainly run on electric power.) ■ But the German version is slow with a top speed of 31 mph. It would need to go seven times as fast to really make any sense in America. China has a 37-mph edition, and Japan has a version that travels at 47 mph, but that again is much too slow for American needs. ■ Could it be done? Undoubtedly the technology is within reach. What it requires is sufficient popular and political impetus to make it seem like a project worth undertaking. The more unreliable air travel becomes (for whatever cause), the closer that day may come.
A paradox we ought to reconsider is that American political parties have become identified with strong ideological alignment while our investment funds are identified with time-oriented outcomes (like short-term bond funds and target retirement funds). We might optimize both sectors of life by reversing those alignments: Affiliating political movements with time-based outcomes and aligning investments with strong belief systems.
November 9, 2025
The city of Tehran doesn't often enter the American public imagination, but it's an enormous place with an estimated 14 million people living in its metropolitan area. What happens there is consequential simply by virtue of the number of lives affected. And right now, they are being affected by a dramatic shortage of drinking water. ■ Water rationing has been imposed, but only to limited success as rainfall has been extremely scarce this year. The president of Iran has gone so far as to say, "If rationing doesn't work, we may have to evacuate Tehran". ■ That was almost certainly an exaggeration for dramatic effect, but the fact is inescapable that it is impossible to sustain a large urban population without reliable water supplies. Concern has already been raised by the depletion of above-ground reservoirs, but the bigger problem is that the preponderance of Tehran's water comes from underground, and those aquifers are not recharging adequately. (That's what often happens in the midst of sustained, multi-year drought). ■ Urbanization is an irresistible trend most everywhere in the world: The prospects for cities are growing vastly faster than for rural areas. That's not going to change. Even if the global population levels out, the trend towards cities isn't going anywhere. This will absolutely demand strategic planning and thoughtful policy management to ensure that cities don't collapse under the weight of drought. ■ On balance, urbanization will be good for human health and longevity. Cities mean access to medical care, diets supplemented by diverse ingredients obtained through trade, and access to quality sanitation techniques. But the pressures that come to bear when drinking water becomes scarce are more than even a competent and responsive government can generally handle. A government that is incompetent or unresponsive to public pressure will fare even worse.
November 12, 2025
The remarkable aurora event visible over much of North America has presented a rare opportunity for a massive population on our continent to share in an extraordinary experience with no effort required (beyond stepping outdoors). People went outside in droves, then flocked to social media to share their photos. ■ John Stuart Mill wrote that "Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing." This event is a perfect illustration of Mill's point. ■ There is a whole industrial complex in ascendance today that is built around taking people out of things like decision loops and review processes. In a handful of cases, it may be because computers can do a fundamentally better and more reliable job. Automation has been around for ages because it promises to reduce errors and deliver consistency, and when it works, it makes life better for people. ■ But there are other cases where the sense is that computers are fundamentally better "thinkers" than people. The aurora experience, though, drives home precisely why that's a faulty assumption. ■ To appreciate an aurora requires some characteristics that are special to humans: A sense of time (for most of us, it doesn't happen very often), a sense of perspective (it's very, very big and we are comparatively very, very small), and a sense of fragility and mortality (it doesn't take long staring up at the stars to start wondering how we even came to exist). ■ None of these can be imbued into a digital computer. The human capacity for wonder and awe should be treated as the precious gift it is. No computer is going to be moved by an image of an aurora. It can't. That's our thing, and it's best enjoyed in company with others.
November 13, 2025
The corporate equivalent of a divorce announcement
It's a strange thing to publicly celebrate the termination of a relationship. Even if there were irreconcilable differences and insurmountable incompatibilities to a pairing, it's still a bit peculiar to see that some people make a living selling whimsical divorce-themed greeting cards. Similarly, it's odd to see how proudly private equity companies announce the sale of the companies they own. ■ The proudly-worded "exit announcement" is a way of saying "We've squeezed what we can from this investment; now we're out!". It's also a way of subtly saying that they've discovered the classic "greater fool" willing to pay a premium price. After all, any rational theory of business holds that an owner should retain that ownership so long as the firm appears to be a going concern with prospects for future returns that exceed the price that a buyer might be willing to pay. ■ Obviously, it doesn't always work out that way; sometimes, a sale is merely an announcement of a reluctant inevitability, as when known newspaper enthusiast Warren Buffett sold his company's newspaper operations to Lee Enterprises after seeing an irreversible deterioration in media economics. ■ But that's the strange thing about private-equity firms: They buy in order to sell. Holding periods are generally in the ballpark of six years -- a single term in the Senate, or about the time it took to build the Channel Tunnel. For all the talk of "partnerships" and "value creation", the whole principle of the approach is centered on the plan to get out. ■ "Buy and hold" isn't an approach that appeals to everyone, but it's hard to find a lot of truly great institutions that passed from one owner to another like a hot potato. And it's similarly hard to find a lot of great fortunes made by turning businesses like a restaurant wait staff turns tables. Patient, sustainable business ownership has a lot going for it that no "exit announcement" will ever represent.
The State Department maintains a web page where it lists all of the countries with which the United States has held diplomatic relations, now or in the past
About 29% of the country now identifies as "religiously unaffiliated" in one form or another
November 14, 2025
Plenty of cybersecurity threats are easy to understand -- vandalism, stolen data, and ransomware are all pretty obvious cases in which malicious behavior has some kind of evident payoff for the bad guys. But the one that lingers like a monster under the bed is the "advanced persistent threat", which is when an adversary gains access to a network and then waits in the shadows. ■ Like any other monster, it's what we don't know that makes the advanced persistent threat scary. The attacker gains access, then bides time until deciding to do something later on. It's the cyber equivalent of deep-cover spies like Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys in "The Americans". ■ The head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation just shared an ominous warning about advanced persistent threats: "I have previously said we're getting closer to the threshold for high-impact sabotage. Well, I regret to inform you -- we're there now." ■ Mike Burgess didn't make any obfuscations about it, either: He pointed straight at China as "conducting multiple attempts to scan and penetrate critical infrastructure in Australia and other Five Eyes countries, targeting water, transport, telecommunications, and energy networks." And he says China complains about his efforts to raise the alarm, which seems only to firm his resolve to say even more. ■ When someone with top-tier access to information and a responsibility for public safety says, "I do not think we -- and I mean all of us -- truly appreciate how disruptive, how devastating, this could be", the rest of us need to urgently pay attention. The whole problem is that we don't know what might be on the other side of an attack, but some adversaries see enough value to start building the scaffolding to get in.
November 15, 2025
A unique relationship with professional sports has been one of the hallmarks of Chicago culture for most of the modern era. Aside from the city's general antipathy to being pushed around or disrespected, an almost fanatical desire to love its teams and their players (and coaches) might be Chicago's most recognizable common characteristic. It's been played up so much that nothing more than a pair of sunglasses and a mustache still stands in for "Chicago" more than 30 years after the end of Mike Ditka's career with the Bears. ■ Thus it is perhaps inevitable that people would associate a Pope born in Chicago with sports culture. First, it was a gift of a Cubs jersey emblazoned with "Leo 14", an interfaith bit of ribbing from the head of the Assyrian Church (who is also a Chicago native). Then, a personalized Bulls jersey. And then, one from Spike Lee in the style of the New York Knicks. ■ Chicago news reporter Heather Cherone notes, "I really had no idea that being [P]ope meant spending so much time accepting personalized sports jerseys". It certainly is an oddity -- is he supposed to wear them on his days off, lounging around the Vatican? But once a thing like this starts to gain traction, the center of attention has a choice whether to lean away from it or to lean in. ■ Perhaps Pope Leo XIV ought to lean in. Welcome the gifts, and even encourage them, offering to auction them off with the proceeds going to Catholic Relief Services or Caritas. It's a way to effectively create something out of nothing: A custom jersey isn't an expensive item on its own, but it is transformed into something of greater perceived value once it passes through the Pope's hands. ■ Instead of selling indulgences, the church could sell these gifts for greater humanitarian causes. Once the photo op has taken place, none of the gift-givers could reasonably expect the Pope to wear the jerseys again, and converting them into objects of charitable value would reflect well on everyone. Artifacts of Pope John Paul II still sell for thousands of dollars, so surely an authenticated Pope Leo jersey might be one of the best premium auction items around.
November 16, 2025
"60 Minutes" furnished the world with a story on "chess-boxing", which is a competition that is exactly as it sounds: Rounds of boxing interspersed with rounds of chess between the two players trying, literally, to knock one another out. It's an eyebrow-raising concept, of course, simply because the two tasks are self-evidently different from one another. Even in other pairings, like the biathlon, there's a reason for disparate activities to be sandwiched together: Sometimes, cold-weather countries have to fight on skis. ■ Chess boxing, on the other hand, is just a marriage of inconvenience. The cognition required to play chess is exactly the kind of thing that boxers sacrifice to traumatic brain injuries. The irrationality of it all is overwhelming. ■ Despite the expansion of protocols and preventative measures to deal with concussions and other sources of man-made damage to the head, we as a society persist in all kinds of voluntary activities that put brains at risk. In the end, there will always be some appetite to participate in these activities because accepting a known risk is an element to both real bravery (as when a passerby rescues children from a burning house) and to the simulation of bravery on a playing field. ■ Maybe, though, instead of committing effort to inventing new ways for people to participate in a brain-risking sport by inventing new twists on boxing, society would be better served by coming up with new sports (or at least new variations on existing sports) that expressly aim to take people out of the pathway to CTE. It is as true as ever that a mind is a terrible thing to waste.
November 17, 2025
An economic-impact study commissioned by the Georgia Public Library Service concluded that the state reaps $3.75 in benefits for every dollar spent on public libraries. The estimated value is measured in everything from volunteer hours to computer time to meeting space, in addition to the obvious value in book-lending. ■ Any study claiming to show economic impact should be taken with considerable skepticism, of course. Nothing matches the kind of returns that people claim will come from the "multiplier effect" of public spending on stadiums and arenas, just for example. It's hard not to find a positive return when you're being paid to look for it: "Whose bread I eat, his song I sing", as the saying goes. ■ But the thing about libraries is that, in any sensible and self-respecting community, they need not show an economic return at all. The real value of a library isn't in the net per-capita return on investment. The value is that any capably-managed library is certain -- dead certain -- to have an utterly transformative effect on some share of its patrons. Maybe it's one in ten. Maybe one in a hundred. Maybe one in a thousand. ■ The frequency itself is both unpredictable and immaterial. What matters is that any decent library in a free country is a place where a person can choose self-betterment. Really, truly choose it. ■ It's the prospect of turning out just one Benjamin Franklin that should appeal to us most. He may have been an unusual character, but he wasn't born in his final form. In his autobiography, he wrote that the library he helped establish in 1730 "afforded me the means of improvement by constant study, for which I set apart an hour or two each day, and thus repair'd in some degree the loss of the learned education my father once intended for me. Reading was the only amusement I allow'd myself. I spent no time in taverns, games, or frolicks of any kind; and my industry in my business continu'd as indefatigable as it was necessary." ■ There's no reason to believe that natural talent is concentrated in any particular race, gender, social class, or other distinction. Everyone benefits when natural gifts intersect with a motivation for self-improvement (as they did in Franklin's case, as in so many others), and the bonanza payoff to a library is found when it opens a door to that self-improvement for someone who otherwise wouldn't have found a way through. ■ Thus, with all due respect to the study in Georgia (which, to be fair, was probably conducted with a fair amount of analytical rigor), the measurable economic returns to libraries shouldn't be the central concern to reasonable communities. What ought to matter is the value in capturing the opportunity to convert a young person with innate gifts into someone with great capacities. Those rare cases can transform the world.
November 19, 2025
In the movie "Airplane!", a chaos agent named Johnny casually turns out the runway lights at the airport by unplugging an extension cord. It's a gag as hilarious as it is improbable. But it also feels, in a small way, like a vision of the structure of the modern Internet. ■ Since many websites and Internet services are scaled up to handle colossal (but highly varied) traffic loads, many depend upon outside vendors to provide hosting services. Among the biggest is Cloudflare, which had an outage yesterday that resulted from a routine attempt to update services to defend against unwanted bot traffic. The disruption affected services at Google and OpenAI, among many others. ■ Cloudflare leadership publicly fell on the sword, and the company has already published a post-mortem that loudly denies any kind of external cyberattack was to blame. (Considering that security is part of their product portfolio, it makes sense that they would be anxious to point this out. ■ It doesn't change the fact that a very small number of companies have extremely high-impact roles in keeping the Internet working. Mess with operations at WordPress, Amazon Web Services, Cloudflare, and a couple of others, and you can put the Internet on its knees. ■ The problem is, our wildly successful and prosperous country gets so much better off so fast in historical terms that we think everything should fall under the "fix-on-failure" model of maintenance. When your 10-year-old toaster breaks, you throw it away, because a new and better one can arrive on an overnight delivery from Amazon before your next breakfast. ■ But infrastructure doesn't work like that at all, and few people really get the concept. It's expensive to properly maintain things, but much less expensive on average than fixing broken things. That's a hard sell in the public sector, and an even harder sell in the private one, especially in an overheated equities market. ■ But the private sector arguably manages more real infrastructure than the public sector: Power plants, railroads, Internet backbone, you name it. And even if Cloudflare's depiction of events is 100% true (and there's no immediate reason to think otherwise), it still doesn't change the fact that massive Internet failure can cascade lightning-fast from just a few sources. The Internet is essential infrastructure in the modern day. Whether we think about making it more robust is a choice.
November 20, 2025
There are many ways to be good
Periodically, it comes back into vogue to vigorously decry the existence of the rich. It's a perennial pastime because it manages to combine envy with political opportunism; others of the seven deadly sins are harder to rally around. (Who ever wanted to stage a rally to decry gluttons? Certainly not the slothful.) ■ Among many other problems, it's hard to make sense out of slogans like "Make billionaires illegal" because they are not designed to acknowledge reality. It is flat-out unavoidable that wealth will be unevenly distributed in any society, just like intelligence, ambition, conscientiousness, drive, persistence, and other personal characteristics that contribute to wealth-building will also be unevenly distributed. Some people will get lucky allocations of some of those factors, and some of those lucky ones will compound their luck with good decisions. ■ Other people will simply get lucky. Some people will have rich uncles or start on the ground floor of a blockbuster startup, just like others will win singing contests or reveal great talent on the football field. The sane choice for a rational society isn't to waste time heckling people who have riches. ■ Kiran Pfitzner, writing under his pseudonym of "Dead Carl" von Clausewitz, makes the point quite well: "More people are very wealthy than ever before, and it's important to give a clear social script for how to be a good person in that position. The culture of aristocratic paternalism has died and that space has been left vacant. Encouraging pro-social behavior means abandoning relentless cynicism." ■ The same goes for all kinds of things that are distributed unequally: We also need social scripts that show how to be a good person when you are unusually intelligent or gifted in other ways. The rogue genius and the abusive auteur should experience social correction. Too many people have tried purchasing their way, if not to respectability, then to social approval, when instead they should have just been (and done) good by virtue of their choices. ■ In the presence of good social scripts, though, we can hold higher expectations of the geniuses, the wealthy, and the influential. Their kinds will always be among us, no matter how much it rankles a character like Bernie Sanders. To argue for abolition of features that will always grow back is a distraction from the real work that needs to be done in calling on people to act virtuously at all times, but especially in ways that rise in tandem with their capacity to do additional good.
November 21, 2025
Two may be greater than three, but three is greater than one
It is far from unreasonable to be unsatisfied with the overall performance of Congress. As an institution, the Article I branch of government often prefers to act like Statler and Waldorf, heckling from the sidelines without really doing anything. But a distressing number of people seem to think that the solution to Congressional dysfunction is to take radical steps to dismantle Federalism, by abolishing the Senate or switching to a national popular vote for President. ■ James Madison was no fool: He understood that human nature always includes an aspect of pride, with an attendant hunger for status and a jealousy to protect it. That's what makes his Federal model work, with branches of government at the same level keeping one another in check and divisions of government at different levels doing the same. ■ The Tenth Amendment is pretty clear about this latter point: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." It was foreseeable, even in 1789, that the national government would try to do too much and that it wouldn't be to the benefit of the "general welfare". ■ The need to restrain the government is exactly what makes a bicameral Congress such a good thing. In order for legislation to advance, it has to pass through two different filters. That increases the odds that the legislation will be arrested before it goes too far. For that matter, if forced to fundamentally change our legislative branch, the better choice would be to add a house of Congress to Article I rather than subtracting one. ■ The seats in the new third chamber could be allocated proportionally by some new standard: Occupation, education, age, or something else. The point of a multi-chamber legislature is to filter out bad ideas -- and that's a good thing! Two chambers is probably quite enough, but three chambers would be better than one.
November 22, 2025
In 1790, the first Census of the United States counted 3,929,214 residents. This national population, just shy of four million, is smaller than the population of 28 states today. ■ It says something about what our expectations should be today for state governments: By any reasonable standard, we should expect them to have the kind of state capacity that we might reasonably expect from a small independent country. That doesn't mean New Mexico needs a blue-water navy, but it does mean that individual states ought to be able to run their own experiments in areas like service delivery. ■ That doesn't mean Oklahoma should have a space program, but it does mean it should be internally capable of handling most ordinary functions of government without relying upon the national government to do the work for it. And yet, as the population of the country has grown, we have over-concentrated our expectations of performance in the bureaucracies of Washington, DC. ■ There are some things only a national government can do, and there are some goods and services that benefit from the economies of scale that a very big government can achieve. But we should have high expectations of our states, which should in turn mitigate how much we expect DC to do. ■ It also suggests that we should hold high expectations for the leaders we think of as "local". After all, the entire group of leaders we know as the Founding Fathers came from a population smaller than that of modern-day Oregon. And that means we wouldn't be out of line to expect a majority of the states today to contain at least one resident as exceptional as each of the Founding Fathers. That's one Washington, one Adams, one Jefferson, one Madison, one Monroe, and one Franklin -- at least! -- in each of Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, as well as 24 other states. ■ Do we have those expectations? Do we demand at least that much expression of talent out of our states? Do we limit what's done at the national level enough to let those gifted individuals close to the people innovate, experiment, and cultivate their skills?
November 23, 2025
Testing the forecasting limits
Science and technology communicators -- whether they're working as public-health officials, NASA outreach ambassadors, or television meteorologists -- all too often run into a thorny problem: It's not so bad that the public often doesn't know the details of science, but it's crippling that so many members don't want to understand certain fundamentals. ■ For example: Weather forecasters don't particularly need people to understand the basic principles of how airmasses behave. It wouldn't hurt, of course, if the public generally knew that cold fronts tend to wedge beneath warmer airmasses due to their greater density, frequently leading to storms. But that's the kind of thing a forecaster can explain with a screen and some graphics. ■ But it would make a world of difference for all of those science and technology communicators if a majority of people could be counted upon to understand the butterfly effect, which says that very small changes in inputs can lead to very big changes in outcomes later on. ■ That's why there's only so far in advance that any weather forecast can reasonably be trusted. There will always be a market for people promising unreal levels of forecasting certainty, but that market can be minimized if there's a general understanding that something like a pinpoint-precise 20-day forecast is mainly snake oil. ■ It's not such a big deal to communicate science if people are willing to listen to the explanations on details. But just like we need a common understanding of phonetics in order for written speech to work, we need common agreement on at least a few big principles for public-facing science to work. ■ The good news is that those big principles tend to apply across a huge range of domains: The butterfly effect is why the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers set off a global recession and how a fried wire made a mess out of air travel in the spring. So if only we can get people to understand and embrace a few big ideas early on, society at large can benefit from the rewards of an advanced understanding of the world.
November 24, 2025
All politics is about legitimacy
Japan has a new Minister of Defense -- Shinjiro Koizumi -- who has had one month on the job. It's not an easy time to hold a post like his, considering the way China's posture towards Taiwan has spilled over into heated words for other parts of the region. China has trotted out "resolute" and "shocking" in its diplomatic messaging over Japan's indications that it would respond to an invasion of Taiwan. China's Foreign Minister even revived "the resurgence of Japanese militarism" as a cause for bellicosity. ■ The Japan Times notes of the new minister's work that "He is now set to face an important test: how to pave the way toward strengthening the country's defense capabilities while obtaining the public's understanding for the move." Obviously, Japan does have a specific military posture enshrined in its constitution that constrains what actually happens in ways that are unusual for such a prominent country. ■ But that need to "obtain the public's understanding" is worth noting because it is universal. All politics is about legitimacy. Democratic systems come right out and ask for legitimacy by holding free, fair, and frequent elections. The people are free to withhold or, in some cases, even withdraw their consent to be governed by an individual or a party. ■ Even those systems that are expressly non-democratic often impersonate democratic ones by conducting sham elections. Those that don't care about pretending to be honorably selected still usually need to do enough to placate the people so as not to be violently rejected. ■ It can be an unenviable spot for a political figure to need to win the public's consent for policies that may be necessary but unpopular, yet that's the calling of the job. Judging from China's saber-rattling, Japan probably does need to enhance its defensive posture. Whether it manages to do so will decide a lot about the region's future.
Inconsistent application of the rules will get you
A British university with strict rules against student use of AI gets caught padding entire lectures with slop
The "Everything Store" is also a huge player in Internet services, so it has to remain aggressive in its cybersecurity posture. Amazon has applied a novel approach to testing its own systems by initiating a project involving multiple artificial-intelligence agents, each with specialized "skills", that work in competing teams to try to break Amazon's infrastructure. It's an automated "red team" that functions to some degree like a human one.
Whatever it was, DOGE isn't anymore
After existing solely in legal ambiguity, the entity "doesn't exist" any longer
November 26, 2025
Comedian Craig Ferguson offers a useful three-point test: "Does this need to be said? By me? Right now?". It's a good heuristic to follow, and not just for individuals. The government, too, can stand to run the same test. It might have stopped the Department of Transportation from launching a taxpayer-funded campaign admonishing air travelers that "The Golden Age of Travel Starts with You." ■ A 90-second Public Service Announcement advertising the campaign relies on gauzy film of 60s-era boarding queues and contrasting cell-phone videos of cabin fights to hint that a "golden age" has been lost and needs to be reclaimed -- including by imploring passengers to "dress with respect". In theory, there's nothing especially wrong with encouraging good, pro-social behavior in public. ■ But there is something massively flawed about appealing to the past as a Platonic ideal to which we should return. First, socioeconomic class imposed a lot of constraints on air travel in the pre-deregulation era. Rich people traveled by air and many others did not. ■ Second, air travel is objectively safer today by such a wide margin that it's hard to put into perspective. Try this: a study conducted at MIT found that there was one fatality on board commercial aircraft for every 350,000 passenger boardings in the era from 1968 to 1977. In the period from 2018 to 2022, that number was one in 13.7 million -- a mind-boggling 39-fold improvement. ■ Other things are much better, too: Most people wear deodorant (a bigger change from the 1960s than you might think), performance fabrics are widely available and affordable (a quality of life improvement in confined spaces, to be sure), and in-flight smoking is prohibited everywhere (which didn't happen until 1990!). ■ Good sense requires rejecting the hazy illusion of better times in the past, even if that means one has to fly next to some bozo in a "Who Farted?" shirt. Yes, appropriate attire is a mark of courtesy. But is it the Federal government's job to nag us about dressing up, just so we can chase a mirage of past glories? The people who start fistfights in coach aren't going to be coaxed into better behavior by being admonished to dress like Don Draper.
November 28, 2025
Thanksgiving is a time of many traditions, not the least of which is the revival of family recipes, often preserved in well-worn annotated cookbooks. These artifacts have a special place in memory, no matter how trivial they may seem. ■ A family is an institution, and all institutions have at least three types of memories they need to preserve: Event memories, decision memories, and event memories. Event memories record what happened, when and where, and to whom -- the kinds of things recorded in a yearbook or a photo album. Decision memories record how and why choices were made; James Madison's "Notes on the Debates in the Federal Convention" tell us how the decisions leading to the Constitution were reached. ■ Ordinarily, a cookbook is the definitional record of process memory: How to get a task done. But well-annotated cookbooks are a superb illustration of crossover from one type to another. When someone marks up a recipe, they extend a process memory into an event memory. It's no longer a simple cake recipe; it becomes the cake recipe Grandma made for every grandchild's birthday. That new dimension is interesting because it adds depth to the memory. There's no longer just "how", there's a "who". ■ That dimension becomes hard to preserve, though, especially as people die, paper deteriorates, and other memories crowd in. It goes to show how fragile memory is in general. Preserving it in the face of pressure, whether acute or general, is a discipline all unto itself. ■ Things are forgotten all the time, usually at a rate much faster than they are remembered. Preservation of memory requires some degree of intentionality -- it doesn't just happen by chance. In a world wherein Facebook is turning to celebrities like Tom Brady to make "Meta Glasses" look appealing as a way to record daily life in 3K video, deciding which memories to preserve (and how) is actually more difficult to perform with intentionality than before. ■ As the saying goes, "If everything is important, then nothing is important". We are privileged to live in a period when we can record more than ever at practically no cost, but we have to match that privilege with a measure of discipline about not imagining that pictures are the only way to preserve a story.
November 29, 2025
Motivation and character count
The institution formerly known as the Boy Scouts of America opened up to welcoming girls as full, regular members in 2019. Girls had long had access to a fraction of the Scouting experience via the Explorer program, but progression through the ranks was an option foreclosed. ■ This has been corrected, and now a pathway to the Eagle Scout Award -- the highest award in Scouting and the best-recognized in all of youth leadership development -- is wide-open for girls who have the initiative, character, and persistence to go after it. This change makes Scouting America (the organization's present name) more useful to the country. ■ There is not one single aspect of the Scout Oath or point in the Scout Law that depends upon gender. It's just as important for girls to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent as it is for boys. Practicing these virtues is good for boys and girls alike, and society is better off if we promote them in 100% of our people, rather than telling 50% they may not apply. ■ The same changes that have made Scouting safe for girls have also made it safer for boys. And it's important to note how Scouting works, for those of middle school and high school age: The programs are run by and for the Scouts themselves. Adults are there to provide safe supervision and consultation, but the entire point is that Scouting is a matter of youth development -- the movement is trying to produce self-starters, leaders, and problem-solvers who don't wait for someone else to do things for them. ■ There are some who think the contemporary format of Scouting is unfavorable to boys. People with these impressions are, mainly, imposing a wildly erroneous model that doesn't fit the program -- and never has. ■ Scouting isn't a warehouse for unruly boys. It's a character-development and skill-development program for youth -- adolescents who are on the verge of becoming adults. It is a good thing made better through reforms like those of the present day. ■ There's likely nothing more urgently needed in America today than motivated leaders with good character. Likewise, there is little better we can do for adolescents than give them worthwhile goals and constructive paths to a skilled, confident adulthood. Boys and girls can follow those paths alike.
November 30, 2025
A campaign in Great Britain is pressing for teachers to have a four-day teaching week, splitting the traditional fifth day of the work week off so that they can spend it doing lesson preparation and grading without students around. Every community has to reach its own conclusions about critical matters like education, of course, but something about the demand for a four-day teaching week seems like a colossal regression -- the kind of thing one might try to impose from the outside in a shadowy strategic campaign to permanently hobble an adversary, rather than what any people would rationally impose on themselves. ■ Some 125 years ago, Booker T. Washington sought to rally the students at his Tuskegee Institute. Many were being trained to become teachers in rural communities in the American South, still very much in the shadow of the evils of slavery. Washington emphatically believed in the usefulness of education as the primary pathway out of poverty and social oppression. ■ In one address, entitled "To Would-Be Teachers", Washington implored his students: "Where it is possible, take a three or four months' public school as a starting point, and work in co-operation with the school officers, but do not let the school close at the end of these three or four months, because if that is done it will amount to almost nothing." He pleaded with them to take the meager funding allotted by the state (only enough for three months a year) and raise the funds to keep going longer. ■ In another address, he charged: "Take a three months school, and gradually impress upon the people of the community the need of having a longer school. Get them to add one month to three months, and then another month, until they get to the point where they will have six, seven or eight months of school in a year." This was a man desperate to see futures turned for the better, and the thing he wanted most was to see more resources devoted to making school available longer. ■ Expectations of schools and teachers may be different now whan they were more than a century ago. But it's hard to reconcile "reduce classroom time by 20%" with an authentic belief that children's well-being is being put first. If you want to know what a community values, don't watch their words -- watch the flow of resources.