Gongol.com Archives: April 2026
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April 1, 2026
To far less widespread fanfare than was appropriate to the occasion, NASA has launched Artemis II, a mission to orbit the Moon with a live human crew. It's an ambitious project on the part of an agency that has been downscaled significantly by executive-branch intervention. ■ A diverse, populous, and continent-sprawling nation like the United States needs certain bold common endeavors to give the public a widespread rooting interest in times of peace and prosperity (and something aspirational to keep up hopes when times are tough). We've had the Interstate highway system and the Apollo missions, which to some extent channeled the same kind of energy that went into the common purpose of winning World War II. Even the 80s-defining effort to triumph in the Cold War had something of that same rallying spirit. ■ But we really haven't repeated any of that in the years since: The abundance and technological optimism of the 1990s could be dizzying, but we missed the opportunity to channel a sliver of that momentum into a specific public purpose. And the two and a half decades since have been characterized more by strife than by esprit de corps. ■ Perhaps that can be at least partly explained by the lack of a common project. Economically and technologically, the last quarter-century has been remarkable in many ways. But sometimes it is the lack of a motivating challenge that brings out the worst of our petty differences, our cynicism and ennui, or our dissatisfaction with objectively good times. As Benjamin Franklin put it in 1742, "They who have nothing to trouble them will be troubled at nothing." ■ A common project doesn't have to be outrageously expensive nor overwhelmingly large to do some real good -- it just has to be ambitious enough to capture the imagination and constructive enough that public figures can talk about it and the general public can follow its progress. And while it may not satisfy the strictest libertarian instincts (the ones that don't want to see government doing anything beyond the strictly necessary), some things we must do to pay the social-cohesion tax. It shouldn't be hard for even middling leaders to summon the personal wonder and awe to get people stirred up about missions to the Moon.
April 3, 2026
One of the most important safety-related insights of the last several decades has been the realization that honest, direct feedback and reporting on observations free of deference to authority can be a life-saving tool. This has most prominently been adopted within commercial airplane cockpits, where it takes the form of CRM, or crew resource management. Cockpits remain hierarchical places, but if any member of the flight crew observes something alarming, contemporary CRM says it's their job to say something without deference and it's the commanding pilot's duty to listen without prejudice. ■ CRM goes farther than that, to be certain, but the idea holds that everyone on board is safer if everyone up front is considered a contributing member of the decision-making system. This concept was born out of tragic experience, including crashes that probably could have been avoided if pilots in command had listened to their first officers, or if junior officers hadn't been reluctant to speak up. ■ CRM has a place in upper leadership, too. When general and flag officers are sidelined or forced out because their professional perspectives are inconvenient to their overseers, something highly problematic is brewing. Just like a co-pilot needs to be able to say "I think we're in danger and need to go around", a general needs to be free to say, "I think we're pursuing a misguided strategy". Not only that, but statements of honest dissent need to be welcomed. ■ Ultimate authority (and responsibility) lie with civilian officials under our Constitution, and there's no doubt that sometimes a person wearing a lot of stars needs to be let go (see: Douglas MacArthur, who was pretty clearly insubordinate). But it should be a rare thing for upper-echelon talent to be jettisoned without obvious cause. ■ Just as in the cockpit, it's not just important for all sets of eyes to be on the action, it's essential that professional judgment be heard without prejudice. Real national security isn't the product of individual genius; it's altogether too complex for that.
April 4, 2026
The pain of childbirth is not entirely forgotten, though the halo effect of holding a newborn often changes how the memory is storedfor the long term. This holds true for lots of other difficult experiences, too. It's a good thing, at least on the individual level: If we're going to remember anything about the past, it's generally going to leave us happier overall if we can retain more of the good memories than the bad. But at a social level, this leaves us in a real bind. ■ When society glosses over the shortcomings of the past, we end up amplifying and over-emphasizing glossy nostalgia, forgetting that there were bad aspects, too. This arises quite chronically when people try to compare present living standards with those of the past, particularly when the past is just far enough away to be outside of living memory for more than half of the population. ■ That means we need to be doubly cautious about anything popularly "remembered" from about thirty to eighty years ago. Anything older than that, and few people have first-hand memories. But in that half-century window resides a peculiar combination of first-hand and second-hand memories, which often resist fact-checking and even more often resist reasonable contextualization. ■ A fair number of characters quite vocally argue that basic affordability of universal needs like food, housing, and health care has plunged since the 1980s. Some people fight back against this overblown nostalgia, but it's a tough fight when they're arguing with people who don't even realize how much has changed. ■ Microwaveable bags of frozen vegetables were a huge culinary improvement over their canned counterparts, to name one of the most mundane possible examples. Who even thinks about them today, when 90% of American households have microwave ovens? But only 25% of American households had them in 1986. If you were eating steamed frozen peas rather than mushy canned ones when Ronald Reagan was President, then you were among the elite. ■ Housing wasn't especially affordable then, and a lot of places still had lead paint on the walls and ashtrays on the tables. This doesn't mean we shouldn't still press for much more improvement in the policies that affect things like food and housing affordability, but it's profoundly unhelpful to ignore that progress has been made. Progress isn't always steady, nor even, nor fast enough, nor widely enough shared. But hanging on to romanticized hallucinations about the past is one of the surest ways to obstruct real advancements in the present. ■ Theodore Roosevelt said, "[W]e must face the facts as they are. We must neither surrender ourselves to foolish optimism, nor succumb to a timid and ignoble pessimism." Those words, published in 1897, were good advice long before any of us were born. They remain sound recommendations today.
April 5, 2026
Suppose for a moment that you were trying to design a plan for lasting, positive regime change in an adversarial country. One of the most important things you could do for the new regime is to ensure that they could focus promptly on securing the consent of the public through legitimizing actions -- cleaning out corruption, reducing oppressive tax burdens, and responding competently to public demands. Decent governments have failed for their inability to "deliver the goods", and indecent ones have managed to rule places for decades by looking like the best competent option. ■ Blowing up power plants and other civilian infrastructure is a sure way to smother any potential rehabilitation effort in the womb. Getting the proverbial trains to run on time is hard enough in good times. It's vastly harder to do when the infrastructure has been torn apart. Infrastructure, generally, is expensive, slow, and difficult to install, meanwhile oversight is difficult to achieve since the invitations to dishonesty are so many. ■ Any new regime can have staying power only if it can succeed in earning some of its credibility by doing he job right. It's extremely hard to do the work of rebuilding without the lights on.
April 6, 2026
A story reported by Reuters says that South Korean officials are coming to believe that Kim Jong Un has picked his successor: His daughter, thought to be around 13 years old. It's not that Kim's demise is imminent; aged somewhere in his lower 40s, he's a spring chicken by comparison with many heads of state. ■ But he is the heir to a dreadful family business, and consolidating power around a blood-related heir is a sly way of trying to head off any future competition for power. She's only about the age of the iPhone 5. ■ Government by absolute hereditary monarchy is stupid. No matter what outfit it wears, whether it's dressed up in robes like Henry VIII or wearing a Mao suit, it's still stupid. Just because they call it "socialism" doesn't change the fact that it's a monarchy. ■ And it's stupid not because it's impossible for a multi-generational family operation to produce conscientious leaders; successful family transfers happen in the private sector, as long as the families involved are careful to steer clear of the pitfalls of going "from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations". ■ The powerful hereditary monarchy is a terrible and corrupt idea because it deprives people of their own choice in their governance. None of us would want to live under so much as a parks department governed by a hereditary monarchy. Not a school board, not a city council, not a county board of supervisors. Not a statehouse, an EPA region, nor a Federal Reserve bank district. ■ But above all, absolutely not a national government.
April 9, 2026
The moral sense of a golden retriever
Any decent moral framework for living among other people must start with the premise that humanity isn't a solo enterprise: Our individual experiences of the world are unique, but none of us is unique for having the human experience in a bigger sense. Nobody's life is more or less valuable, nobody's joys and pains are more or less real, nobody's intrinsic worth as a person is greater or less than another's. All are enormously valuable. ■ Our worst atrocities as a species have resulted from the practice of dehumanization. A chattel slave-keeper is only enabled to see another person as "property" when they cease to see that other person as human. Empathy discourages us from inflicting pain and suffering on others. ■ Some people obviously lack the basic aspects of empathy, whether by disorders of the mind, by intoxication, or by choice. And while that doesn't diminish their own intrinsic value as human beings, it does mean that they should be kept far away from the tools that would allow them to inflict pain on others, at least to the best of society's ability to police such things. ■ Cruelty, sociopathy, sadism, and other pathologies that rely upon treating others as less human, or their sufferings as less real, must be addressed as real moral defects. Even dogs can sense emotions in people and regulate their own behaviors accordingly. Many dogs even show real signs of empathy for the humans around them. ■ People need to be at least as willing to have concern for others, lest they show themselves to be less morally sophisticated than a golden retriever. It is wrong to inflict suffering or to weaponize fear against other people -- no matter how far away or how different they might seem. We are all equally human, and to recognize and behave according to that simple (but too often elusive) understanding is a moral requisite.
April 10, 2026
Will public health carry us forward?
In his book "The Cost Disease", economist William Baumol delivered one of the most important insights for anyone involved with public budgets. It distills to this: Technological progress will tend to make many goods better and cheaper because their production can be automated and standardized at scale. But lots of "high-touch" services will always be demanded, and there's only so much that can be done to make them more efficient. Improvements can be made to the quality of a haircut, an annual physical exam, or a tutoring session, but they can hardly be made more efficient: A 45-minute massage is not more "efficient" than a 60-minute massage, it's just shorter. ■ This matters to public budgets because governments pay for health care in all kinds of ways (Medicare, Medicaid, VA benefits, and health insurance benefits for public-sector workers, to name some of the big ones), and because health care is extremely high-touch (literally and figuratively), many of those health-care costs are bound to grow both in absolute terms and as a share of budgets, irreversibly and indefinitely. ■ The resulting message isn't very satisfying: "Health care will get better and more expensive as far into the future as you can imagine, taking up more and more of everyone's budget with no end in sight, but you'll be OK with it because lots of other things will get better and cheaper, leaving room for you to still feel much richer." This doesn't mean efficiency improvements don't matter in health care -- just that they're inherently difficult to find. ■ With National Public Health Week drawing to a close, it's timely to observe that if Baumol was right, then the public health professions are almost certain to grow in importance and consequence -- basically in perpetuity. In statistical terms, our three biggest health victories in the last two centuries have been antibiotics, vaccinations, and safe drinking water, and the latter two are squarely in the public-health domain. ■ Prevention usually costs less than cure, and if we can discover more high-impact tools of prevention, those might be our only ways to put brakes on the growth in health-care spending. The question is: Will the public health professions have the resources, imagination, and credibility necessary to carry that burden?
April 11, 2026
Putting the "common" in commonwealth
Ontario, which is Canada's most populated province and by far its largest provincial economy, is underperforming its neighbors. The Frasier Institute says it lags behind every one of its neighboring US states (a big crowd, considering Ontario's large physical size). And not by just a little: By Fraser's calculations, it's anywhere from 7% behind Michigan to 45% behind New York in per-capita GDP. ■ By their nature, professionalized think tanks tend to be good at establishing provocative claims and putting them in front of policy-makers, so any claim that gets made in a think-tank study should be viewed with appropriate skepticism. But there often is truth in them nonetheless. ■ It's not that Ontario isn't rich in absolute, historical, or even most relative terms -- given the choice between being born in Ontario today, Cuba today, or New York in 1926, there's no doubt that Ontario today wins. But government policies (like taxation) have compounding effects over time: If taxation is too high or investment in public needs is too stingy, then that affects today's economy with reverberations for many decades to come. And the gap Fraser's report identifies is growing, which is worrisome. ■ Economic riches alone do not decide whether a place is a good one to live, nor whether it's a just and decent one. But economic resources do make it much easier to pay for a great number of good and valuable things. Most Americans continue to respect Canadians not just as good neighbors, but as valued partners in any number of endeavors in the world. Our successes are mutual, which doesn't give us license to boss one another around, but does give us common interest in figuring out what models work best.
April 12, 2026
The Catholic Archdiocese of Dubuque, Iowa, has announced a plan to consolidate pastoral services across its region. The archbishop himself cited a striking statistic: Mass attendance has fallen by 46% in the last 20 years. ■ It's not uncommon to hear about declining attendance at conventional religious institutions in America (like Catholic and mainline Protestant churches). Some of the change may reflect changing theological commitment, to be sure. But that doesn't account for the entire decline. ■ Church leaders who are serious about the viability of their ministries need to ask themselves a pointed question: What about the experience has improved meaningfully since the turn of the century? Not on a superficial level, but on a real and human one -- what's gotten better? ■ Except for cloistered or monastic communities, most churches exist within an extensive surrounding world. In that world, people have experienced some overwhelming changes, from handheld supercomputers to self-driving cars. Many of the changes start with technologies, but they go on to affect behavior -- consider the near-ubiquity of fitness trackers, and how a phrase like "Closing my rings" is full of behavioral meaning. ■ What has gotten better inside the churches? Has the preaching improved? The outreach? The anticipation of needs? The individualized pastoral care? The skillful delivery of charitable community services? The attention to new and difficult ontological questions uncovered by developments like artificial intelligence? ■ If the answer to all of those questions is nothing but a shrug, then that's the difference between manageable contraction and terminal decline. Most people don't expect perfection, but they do reasonably expect improvement. It can be incremental, it can be cautious, and it can be mild. But it needs to be something.
April 15, 2026
A majority of American adults picked up a book last year, but according to a Pew survey, a Pew Research survey, many of the others only read a handful. ■ Putting aside the lamentations for a moment, there's a really interesting question lurking just beneath the surface: What kinds of books are not being published right now that would entice more people to read them? What would it take to motivate the 52% who read three books or fewer to read just one more this year than last? ■ If an entertainment product has extremely low penetration with 52% of the market, then you have to spend at least a little bit of time asking how much of that is a supply problem. ■ How much of this is a content problem? People will practically crawl over broken glass to get to really great content. ■ How much of this is a modality problem? Are people missing out because they aren't exposed to audiobooks, e-readers, or phone/tablet-friendly formats? ■ How much of this is an authorship problem? One might think that in the era of "parasocial" relationships with "influencers", time spent with the right authors would be attractive. ■ How much of this is a style problem? Too many books are too long -- do we need a better booklet/pamphlet economy? ■ There are probably nearly as many reasons why some people don't read books as there are reasons why others do. We should steer clear of fetishizing any activity, but of all possible leisure activities, reading surely must rank towards the top of the list. Figuring out why it's passing so many Americans by would be a tremendous service.
April 16, 2026
Seriously, stop using meaningless adverbs
One of the classic standards of news writing was that journalists should use adverbs sparingly, if at all. This rule sounds stodgy at first -- after all, we use adverbs in regular speech, so why not in reporting as well? But it makes sense upon further examination. ■ First, they're often more filler than substance. She ran quickly? Of course it was "quickly", she ran. He screamed loudly? It would have been news if the scream was quiet, not loud. Economical writing skips what doesn't add value. ■ Second, adverbs are unaccountable. Who is to say what is done gracefully, thoughtfully, or mercilessly? The adverb is most often a judgment call. The fewer the subjective statements, the more objective the report. ■ There is one adverb in particular that needs to be struck -- unrelentingly -- from modern news reporting: "Strongly". Some journalists can't get enough of it: In just one report, CNN said that the President "strongly criticized Pope Leo XIV", the Pope "strongly pushed back", and the Italian minister "strongly denounced the US president's comments". Strange that so much strength can result in such weak writing. ■ When an incident can be more truthfully depicted with an adverb, the writer should go right ahead and use it. But an adverb like "strongly" could mean anything from "loudly" to "emphatically" to "thoroughly" to "exhaustively", all of which might be better adverbs (being more specific than "strongly"), but none of which are necessary...probably. "Strongly" has become a filler word for the clickbait era, and it ought to be retired. Quickly.
April 17, 2026
Though we don't really make much direct use of the word itself, we live in a period that is infatuated with automation. Generative artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, and "smart home" products are all derivatives of the same instinct to make machines do more of our work. ■ That isn't a wrong instinct, but it could use a little bit of temperance -- a sensibility, borrowed from Ecclesiastes, that there is a time for all things. Springtime offers the compelling reminder that nature has always had a form of automation, unlikely as that may seem, in the form of perennial plants. ■ While lots of things (including most food crops) need to be planted each year, many plants fall dormant as fall turns to winter, then reawaken -- automatically -- with the return of sunlight, rain, and other resources in the spring. Once planted, perennials "know" when it's time to come back, even without any cognition. ■ Perennials don't belong everywhere; they foreclose on practices like crop rotation and letting fields go fallow. Nor do perennials offer all of the same benefits in the same measures as their annual counterparts; if you see a really spectacular flower, there's a pretty good chance it's an annual. And many perennials need boundaries, since their ability to keep coming back means they can encroach on other plants if left unchecked for long. ■ The same kinds of lessons, long proven by the trial and error of billions of years of evolution, should be applied to the creations of our own modern making. Automation doesn't belong everywhere; it may fall short of what rival approaches can do. It may have appealing outputs, but they're not always going to be better than the work of a focused human. It shouldn't be rushed into every nook and cranny, since it won't always be the best fit. ■ It's easy to be drawn into assuming that every new situation we encounter is really novel, but there are often patterns to recognize in the presence of whatever is new.
April 18, 2026
It's hard to say whether there is any wake-up call that will ever truly break through on the state of America's national budget. The numbers are just too unfathomably large -- like a projection that the interest alone on the national debt will cost $99 trillion over the next 30 years. Nobody is equipped to think in terms of trillions (that's thousand-thousand-millions), and even the per-capita figures are a stretch: Spread across our current population of 342 million, that's $289,473 in interest over 30 years. No matter what democratic socialist dreams come true, there aren't enough "rich" to keep that price from falling on a lot of middle-class taxpayers. ■ Like the other aspects of self-government, the budget depends on us to keep ourselves accountable. It's not an impossible problem to fix, but the longer we remain utterly undisciplined, the harder the choices required later on to correct the problem. ■ Debt isn't necessarily bad on its own, nor necessarily is deficit spending -- the key is that we have to overspend (that is, deficit-spend) by less than the rate of growth of the economy. If the deficit is 1% of GDP, but the economy (that is, the GDP) is growing at 2% a year, then the overspending gets eclipsed by growth. ■ But if the deficit spending is 5.8% of GDP and the economy is struggling to grow consistently at a rate of 2%, then it's pretty obvious we're on an unsustainable path. (And we shouldn't believe the fantastic claims that artificial intelligence will lead to unimaginable economic growth, either -- extraordinary claims call for extraordinary evidence, and that's not on display yet.) ■ Growth is certainly a huge portion of the solution, but it's hard to make a really gigantic economy grow fast. And some of the things that cost the most in the national budget are areas that get more expensive faster than the rate of inflation for everything else -- starting first and foremost with health care. We can do better than this, but the discipline deficit is the leading indicator that we're unlikely to do enough in time.
April 19, 2026
US Navy seizes Iranian cargo ship
The action was undertaken under the auspices of the naval blockade of the Persian Gulf as the Iranian ship tried to head to an Iranian port.
Where did the missing pronouns go?
A brief study of the pronouns once used in English that died off -- like words for "the two of us". In language, as in other things, use it or lose it.
A columnist for The Economist has furnished a gentle warning to those tempted by some of the superficial successes of China's authoritarian state: "Nifty infrastructure is good for growth. But hangdog democrats are wrong to think that autocracies have cracked the code of economic dynamism". ■ Forced to make a choice between the two, it's more important to have liberal values without democracy than to have democracy without liberal values. But the idea that they can be cleaved from one another is farcical: Democratic processes are what secure liberal values in place, by ensuring that those who abuse those values can always be tossed from office. ■ It should never come as a surprise to see an undemocratic state building conspicuous projects: They tend to have unchecked access to financial and other resources, aren't bound by the need to persuade voters of the value of a project before the fact, and rely on highly visible project results in order to secure what little consent they actually try to seek from the public. If you can spend lavishly without facing a tax revolt, don't need to win a referendum, and want to look like you're delivering the goods, then you're probably going to build some big things. ■ Pitted against rivals like this, liberalism can't be afraid to be a little bit muscular. Not overbearing, closed-minded, or pushy, but willing to stand up for principle, confident that character really is destiny, just as much for the culture as for the individual. There should be great self-confidence that not only are liberal values like freedom of thought and the dignity of the individual worth protecting on their intrinsic value alone, but that they are also very good sources of the material things well worth having. They are worth promoting from within and protecting from without.
April 20, 2026
Variations on a well-worn saying go something like, "Those who fail to learn their history are condemned to repeat it." Now, thanks to a paper by three scholars at Oxford, we have empirical evidence: They looked at the history of cost overruns at the Olympic Games between 1960 and 2024 and found that the same old problems happen over and over again -- even though the Olympics happen on a regular schedule, are at the center of enormous attention, and have extremely well-documented track records. ■ Nobody seems to learn, the scholars conclude, because moving the Games from site to site keeps anyone from really accumulating useful institutional knowledge. This is no particular shock to anyone who knows about the problems of institutional memory, but it nevertheless seems odd that despite an obvious (and costly) problem and an abundance of opportunity to improve, nobody appears to know quite how to do it. The Games go on, they end up blasting through budgets and cobbling things together in the 11th hour to pull off the event. ■ Institutional memory comes in three forms: Event memories, decision memories, and process memories. Event memories get documented fairly well -- it's not hard to find photos, videos, and news stories about the last several Olympics. It's the other two that are much harder. Decision memories explain why one path was chosen over another. Unfortunately, though, even though decision trees aren't hard to build, the motivation to record them is hard to find (especially if the people making today's decision don't expect to have any part in the event two or four years from now). ■ And process memories are similarly hard to get down on paper. A recipe book is really just a collection of many different process memories: How to start with nothing and end up with the creation you wanted. The case may be especially hard with a sui generis kind of institution like the Olympics, but it's rare even among successful organizations to find well-documented process memories. A few firms do it exceptionally well (Honda, for instance, reputedly sets the gold standard), but in a huge share of cases, people either actively or passively decline to record their process memories because keeping the knowledge locked up between their ears is a form of job security. Fire me, lose my insider knowledge. ■ The authors think the "myopia of learning" that plagues the Olympics is only rectifiable through sweeping reforms (which are unlikely, given the structural incentives involved). But the problem is far more widespread than just with the IOC and host city committees, and it's fascinating to consider just how obvious the answers are and yet just how few institutions seem equipped to implement them.
April 21, 2026
The Financial Times reports that a law firm whose partners bill at a rate of $2,000 an hour got caught submitting AI-hallucinated materials in a bankruptcy filing. Excuses have been made ("Protocols were not followed"), but it's unlikely that heads will roll. A low-level employee might get shoved out the door, but not anybody who's "too big to fail" within the partnership. ■ By now, it is plainly obvious to anyone watching that artificial intelligence tools, as powerful as they are, will be perpetually incapable of some human characteristics. One of those is honor. Honor is a sensibility, rooted in a complex web of feelings like shame, pride, dignity, and duty. ■ Not to put too fine a point on it, but feelings are embodied sensory experiences: No matter how "smart" it appears that a machine has gotten, it is impossible for it to experience feelings. They are biochemical sensations, often involuntary, and not particularly susceptible to intellectual override. If you don't have the biological architecture of things like a nervous system and a bloodstream, it's quite impossible to imagine how you could have feelings. (Or, more simply, feelings are impossible for anything without a body to feel them.) ■ Suppose you have put your name on work made up (in this case, quite plainly fabricated) by a machine, in a legal situation where truthfulness counts, and then charged other human beings $2,000 an hour for your supposed labors. You should feel some very strong sensations related to a sense of honor. It's hard to say at what rate exactly that behavior should stop feeling entirely dishonorable, but $2,000 an hour is definitely well above the threshold. ■ Eagerness to use new tools has never been a sufficient justification for behaving dishonorably. Any technology is only as good or bad as the people using it: A knife can be used to slice bread for the hungry or to commit murder. We do ourselves no favors in forgetting that honor has to play a part in the implementation process. ■ The technology isn't going to do that work for us -- without feelings of its own, it plainly cannot. And the rest of us must be willing to shame and shun those who abandon honor, no matter how clever or well-paid they appear to be. Honor is a feeling that cannot be synthesized.
April 22, 2026
It seems quite likely that one of the anthropological reasons that human beings form friendships is because our hefty brains and extraordinary capacity for language make our knowledge inherently social. We don't have to know everything if we have ways of communicating with others who have the knowledge we require, and if we trust them to share it faithfully. Friendship is inherently good for putting stakes on the preservation of that trust: Nobody wants to be the friend who lies or even modestly abuses the trust of others. ■ This may be one of the key reasons why the present feels unusually disorienting. In the past, unless your friend happened to be a daily newspaper columnist, you generally had to solicit a specific opinion, ask a particular question, or be in an intentional social environment (like a bar) before you'd know what a friend thought about a subject. You might have had a good guess, but there was generally an aspect of "pull" to finding out. ■ Social media turns that on its head and makes many of those exchanges into "push" relationships: You find out because someone shared a meme on Facebook or posted an update on Snapchat. The algorithms involved push the messages even further, doing nothing to moderate the frequency of what you see according to how close you are to the friend or how much you trust them. ■ Into these feeds is also blended a torrent of material from "parasocial friends", like celebrities and "influencers". Many have become quite good at activating the responses of friendship for commercial exploitation. ■ The ability to ask friends and trust the response is why it feels like such a transgression when a purported friend tries to monetize a friendship -- or simply lie. Both violations feel plainly wrong in ordinary life, and yet they happen almost constantly over social media. And it doesn't have to be an intentional lie to have the same friendship-corroding effects: It's a very normal experience today to see one too many untruths from an acquaintance, whether it's a political message untethered from reality or an AI-generated video fake shared by a gullible viewer, and conclude that a "friend" really can't be trusted. ■ That experience, repeated over and over for years on end, is quite enough to undermine the kind of faith we have always needed to make good use of knowledge as a social enterprise. We don't know how it will resolve in the future, but we can be sure that it is and will remain consequential for as long as these technologies are around as we know them.
April 23, 2026
In the middle of a naval conflict
Why do people still have warm feelings about teletext services?
"It was an elegant system: fast, low bandwidth, unaffected by user load, and delivering readable text even on analog television screens", says an author who's built an experimental project to send teletext via ham radio.
Forbes has come up with an alternative to its ranking of the world's billionaires, estimating what individuals would have had if they hadn't given portions of their fortunes to charity. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, both still incredibly wealthy by the strictest accounting terms, look far wealthier in the revised, donation-adjusted figures. ■ It's funny how status remains a thing that even ultra-rich people feel compelled to chase -- at least, most of them. Money does have diminishing marginal utility: There are only so many hamburgers one person can eat. But esteem matters to us all, and mortality cannot be escaped indefinitely. As Buffett has said, "I mean, I can buy anything I want, basically, but I can't buy time." ■ There are two sets of people whom the rest of us should regard with great wariness: One is the cluster who confidently pronounce things like "Billionaires shouldn't exist". They arrive at this conclusion by making the indefensible logical leap that great wealth can only be accumulated by some "at the expense of everyone else". This absurd conclusion is easily dismissed by a simple thought experiment: If someone were to discover a cure for some dreadful disease, like pediatric leukemia, then how much would be too much to reward them? Surely an achievement like that would be worth a reward equal to $3 per resident of the United States, and even if it took a special tax assessment to accumulate such a jackpot, it would be a morally just reward. Some merit most certainly can and should be rewarded at scale. ■ The other people to be avoided are the ultra-wealthy who disregard their fundamental involvement in society. As the Communist Party of China seems intent on reminding its wealthiest subjects, money can only buy so much if the government doesn't respect the dignity of the individual. ■ Wealth can't be aggregated very well by exploitation. Some powerful crooks can capture a lot, but there is far more room within a free economy for lots of people to gain massive wealth by delivering goods or services that other people want. And when they do, if they've been raised right, they'll see the virtue in considering generosity to be a luxury good worth spending upon.
"Civil discourse is not working well right now", says the co-founder. That seems dire.
April 24, 2026
The 2026 National Volunteer Week concludes on April 25th. It shouldn't escape anyone's attention just how significant the volunteerism sector is in America -- there are high-profile opportunities to help with things like Habitat for Humanity, of course, but there are also thousands of little ways in which people contribute to their local animal shelters, blood banks, PTAs, Scout troops, churches and temples, libraries, and other institutions of civil society. ■ It can be much more valuable for professionals to donate their efforts to a cause rather than donating cash, but because nobody in those non-profit institutions is compelled (for deductibility reasons) to be conscious of the billable rates those professionals charge in the marketplace, they risk overlooking just how valuable those in-kind service donations really are. ■ There may be no task more important for non-profit managers to undertake than making it as easy as possible for high-value experts to donate their time for maximum efficient impact. Someone capable of donating services with a market price of $250 an hour shouldn't be directed to spend their time on $10 an hour work (unless they really want to do it). Knowing the array of skills and talents available to an institution and making the maximally efficient use of them is as important as fundraising -- and perhaps even more important. ■ Significantly, though, the other thing non-profit managers should do is concentrate heavily on making every meeting, training session, and report as efficient as possible. People with valuable skills tend to be conscious of the value of their time, and wasting that time on poorly-organized board meetings, webinars, strategy sessions, and workshops isn't just disrespectful: It deters high-value volunteers from volunteering. ■ The best thing anyone can do when leading a group of volunteers is to create an environment that is friendly to participation by people who don't have trouble finding better things to do. The best volunteers aren't looking for ways to burn up spare time; they're the ones juggling other obligations because their worth is widely-recognized. Good organizational management values this in volunteers and invests tirelessly in making sure their experiences aren't just superficially pleasant, but really look like the best use of highly-sought-after time.
The CEO of United Airlines says airfares will probably jump by 20% this summer to make up for high jet fuel prices. Meanwhile, the White House is talking openly about buying Spirit Airlines to bail it out of a bankruptcy threat. For an industry that has gone through so much economic whiplash since 2020, it's amazing that anyone still wants to buy a piece of the airline industry. It's a maniacal choice with one's own money, but it's borderline inexplicable with the public purse.
There's a giant hexagonal storm on Saturn
Science is weird sometimes
April 29, 2026
Use less water when you've had too much rain
Seven times this April, the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (MWRD) of Greater Chicago has issued an "action alert", asking residents to curtail their use of water through voluntary conservation practices. These action alerts have not been issued because of a water shortage, but instead because of excessive rainfall. ■ At first, this seems paradoxical: If excessive rain is falling from the sky, why should conservation be on anyone's mind? Most surpluses don't result in requests to cut back on consumption. ■ The reason is that the MWRD isn't charged with managing the supply side of water, but rather the post-consumption disposal of it. And because Chicago got an early start on installing sewers (it was the overflow automatically into the rivers. The less that flows in, the lower the chances of those untreated waste overflows. ■ Thus, what sounds completely backwards at first makes a great deal of sense upon further examination. It's a lesson well worth learning and keeping close to the heart, especially in modern times. Modernity has begotten increased complexity in nearly every aspect of life. ■ The impulse to seek out quick and simplistic answers may come to us very naturally, but we have to be eternally vigilant not to let that impulse keep us from giving a fair hearing to more complex explanations that might land closer to the truth. ■ It's a valuable skill to be able to take complex matters and distill them for easier understanding. But it's a shame to be so stubborn and intellectually lazy as to refuse to consider that sometimes right answers are the exact opposites of what our instincts would tell us.
April 30, 2026
Rep. Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts confessed in a news story with the outlet "NOTUS" that he's using artificial intelligence to augment his parenting: "I have three little kids, and I'll do prompt engineering for a good story. I'm like, 'I want it to be for a 6-year-old, and I want it to be about helicopters'". Setting aside that "prompt engineering" is quite the exaggeration for what he describes, there's something else about the confession that seems misdirected. ■ Parenting can be difficult, exhausting work. As the saying goes, "Long nights, short years." But parenting is also something that humans have been doing as long as there have been humans. And if there's one thing that makes our species truly extraordinary, it's the capacity for complex speech. Speech, in turn, becomes the basis for reading and writing, and the written word unlocks the most powerful way to make ourselves far more intelligent than the limitations of our biological brains. Every book, library, and website becomes accessible, retrievable storage for knowledge that we can borrow without having to remember. ■ Good parenting does involve storytelling -- at bedtime, to teach lessons, or merely to pass the time. And, it turns out, a whole lot of stories have already been written not just to put kids to sleep but to teach them worthwhile lessons: Aesop's fables, to name just one family of examples. ■ We, as parents, don't have to make up everything from scratch, nor rely on LLMs to do the imagining for us. Human nature being what it is, stories have always been a part of parenting, so there are innumerable resources containing stories already written down for us. It may sound like cleverness to turn to artificial intelligence to "write" bespoke bedtime stories, but it's a misapplication of the tools, like trying to drive an Indycar to pick up groceries. ■ Great stories have already been written! Moreover, becoming familiar with some of the canonical stories is an important part of social knowledge -- we need stories, metaphors, and lessons to hold in common. To be able to say something in shorthand like "tortoise and hare" and have it convey real information is a meaningful part of development. Customizable, single-serving bedtime stories might be fine for the occasional change of pace, but the vast library of pre-existing works should routinely get the first look.