Gongol.com Archives: May 2026
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May 1, 2026
Even novices to the finer details of body language know how to recognize someone walking with an air of confidence: Broad strides, shoulders back, spine upright and straight. An erect posture takes up more space than a hunched or slouching one, and that space-filling is one among many cues that say to potential attackers "Go find an easier target". Merely making an intentional choice about how to look has at least some deterrent effect on would-be wrongdoers. ■ The force posture of a country isn't a perfect analog to how one walks down a darkened street at night, it's not really that far different. Walking with confidence is a way to dare others to put up or shut up. ■ Due to some intemperate remarks by Germany's chancellor, the Pentagon has decided to remove 5,000 troops from German soil within a year. It's not a strategic plan; it's a political reaction. ■ The right number of troops to have in Germany may be more or less than the number there right now. But as a matter of body language, a withdrawal right now -- with Russia shamelessly menacing the European continent -- looks like slouching. It may not exactly represent an invitation to trouble, but it definitely doesn't look like an energetic display of confidence.
May , 2026
Being made up of imperfect people, as it is, the world is a pretty flawed place. Much is in need of repair, reform, or renewal. It has always been this way, and our best hope is to make durable progress against shortcomings when and where we can. ■ In light of these many imperfections, people have choices to make. Some remain indifferent, some become incensed (and revel in the anger), and others get to work doing things to bring about change. The enduring problem with change is in making it stick: As anyone who has ever tried to correct a bad habit knows, it's easier to uncover a fault than to hold tight to a plan that makes it go away. ■ The astute observer learns to tell the differences among the different types of people by paying attention to whether they fixate on desired results or invest their energies into finding a reasonable path. A youthful questioner at the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting lodged an accusatory barrage at company leadership, demanding to know when the company (which owns lots of electric utility subsidiaries) would cease all use of coal out of fear of global warming. ■ The real answer, of course, is that while electrical generation from coal is less than ideal from the perspective of carbon pollution, one of the major shifts underway is a broad move towards electrification -- particularly in areas like automobiles. In other words, to get rid of combustion-engine pollution, choices are being made to create greater demand for electricity. ■ And while the electrical generation mix in the United States has been swinging massively towards a mix of natural gas and renewable sources, we haven't solved certain large problems like battery storage well enough to rely solely on renewables -- and nuclear power still faces big hurdles with regulators and public opinion. There's no way to eliminate carbon-based fuels overnight. To get from the present to a better future, we have to go through a very long and imperfect "in-between". ■ In the words of Teddy Roosevelt, "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are." But it's hard to communicate that to people who fixate single-mindedly on a destination without seeking to answer "How will we get there from where we are now?". Youthful passion doesn't always see this, but sober-minded adults need to teach them the way. ■ As Margaret Thatcher once reminded the leaders of Poland's Solidarity movement, one must always ask, "How do you see the process from where you are now to where you want to be?". To do without only condemns us to frustration and escalation.
May , 2026
One of the highly consequential trends of the day is the demographic cliff coming to bear on colleges and universities. Because of a contraction in births tied to the financial panic of the 2008-2009 era, there's a real shortfall in 18-year-olds available to enter higher education. It's not just a one-year blip, either; the population pyramid is worth a close look for what's to come. ■ Speculation runs rampant that this will be the trigger to put many marginally sustainable colleges and universities out of business. Another trend, though, might offer a map to one possible way out. ■ As Ben Sasse remarked in his insightful interview with "60 Minutes", lifelong learning hasn't been the model for higher education, but it's exactly the model the American public needs. Not exclusively for career purposes, but not exclusive of those purposes, either. ■ Lots of things -- perhaps too many -- are being converted from goods that are purchased once and used indefinitely into services that come with a recurring subscription model. But higher education should be able to serve two concurrent purposes: The signaling effect of a diploma remains as valuable as ever and it isn't going away, but the future may well belong to those institutions that can offer a sort of perpetual renewal plan -- like a lifetime warranty on the actual learning content. ■ We have community colleges already, often very prudently focused on accessible delivery of highly practical learning. We need more community-centric universities, where a social compact can be fulfilled between scholars and the public. Students can and should graduate, of course, but it should become normalized for them to return after graduation to round out their learning, brush up on forgotten skills, and get brought up to speed on the state of the art. The community of learners needs to move beyond the student body as a bunch of four-year vagrants and evolve into a persistent, life-long relationship. ■ The community should see the necessity of its role in financially sustaining the community-centric university as one half of the social compact, while the scholars need to see their mirroring obligation to look after the intellectual well-being of the community by keeping the people well-informed. What precise form that should take is up for reasonable debate, if only because it really hasn't been tried before. But if the problems are as significant as they appear to be, we need to find the energy to start experimenting with solutions -- and without delay.
May 6, 2026
While adoption rates have long been a popular way to track as new technologies surge into the public consciousness, it's less clear to tell how declining technologies should be tracked. A technology that achieves a 50% household penetration rate is clearly on the rise, but when does a technology become clearly "out"? ■ The former Gannett Co. (now USA Today Co.) is right on the verge of getting 50% of its revenues from digital advertising and subscriptions. Newspapers were notoriously reluctant to embrace digital models because classic print advertising was such a cash cow for so long. ■ But the numbers leave little room for alternate interpretations: The "paper" part is no longer the defining feature of a "newspaper". A portion of this really does represent a real cultural loss, since information isn't just carried by the content of the news stories alone. The layout of a paper, with its embedded cues about where stories rank, is an artifact that offers meaning to historians, among others. ■ And the archival role played by a print edition of a newspaper is noteworthy, too, since old Internet links die out all the time. These sentimental and academic values of newspapers aren't enough to justify extraordinary interventions, but they're worth noting. As digital content continues its relentless march across the landscape, the subtle consequences are worth occasional note, as well.
May 7, 2026
The visit between the first American Pope and the Secretary of State is a vivid example of an art that has been in decline. There have been Popes since the First Century AD, but from 1776 until 2025, Americans always had the ability to lump them in with the "others" of the world. Even when a Pope's origins had a meaningful effect on his actions -- as when Pope John Paul II manifested meaningful support to anti-Communist forces in Poland -- the "otherness" of being Pope and "otherness" of being foreign-born could merge into one characterization. ■ Now, we are contending diplomatically with one of our own, but one who draws upon moral authority beyond national reach. He cannot be "otherized", and that creates an unprecedented circumstance, particularly when politicians want to provoke fights with him. ■ For a variety of reasons, including the flattening of global culture via the Internet and the decay of many of our social and civic institutions, Americans have to some extent lost touch with the idea of institutions that are strong enough to serve as independent wellsprings of moral authority. The Church did itself no favors in this regard with its clergy abuse scandals. ■ Things seem different, though, under Pope Leo XIV, as though a rebuilding process started under his predecessor has begun to gain traction. And it challenges Americans in particular to look and not only witness the importance of drawing personal identity from many overlapping and interacting sources, but also to look for people speaking in our own times whose authority comes from someplace other than government.
May 8, 2026
Leadership hanging by a string
It is entirely possible that the two former Chinese defense ministers who were sentenced to death were in fact guilty of accepting bribes and other acts of corruption. It is also entirely possible that they were not -- especially given that a full-scale purge of China's military leadership seems to be well underway. It's also possible that there could be a grain of truth to the charges, but that the charges themselves have been exaggerated. ■ What is certain is that nobody is ever really secure when a strongman is in charge. The solitary reliable weapon of the strongman is fear, and fear is amplified most by uncertainty. As humans, we're able to face true surprise with adrenaline, and we're able to face known peril with courage. But we're just not wired to live in a state where we could go in an instant from the most elite heights of success to a death sentence overnight, on no more than the impulses of another person. ■ The technique usually works for the strongman -- for a while. If you fear that you could be purged at any moment, that's a fairly strong inducement to show slobbering fealty to the strongman. But no strongman lives forever (see: "The Death of Stalin"), and a life lived long enough in fear sometimes finds that fear metamorphosing into the courage of one facing certain peril. ■ The rest of us looking in from the outside should be alarmed by the apparent fragility of China's state leadership, especially because of the peculiar relationship between party and state: The People's Liberation Army belongs to the Communist Party, not to the people. A system that rigid is also inherently brittle: It's not built for delegation and adherence to the law, it's built for personal loyalty. ■ Public corruption is very bad, but it's also easy to fabricate -- especially when the authorities charged with proving the case have a lot of their own personal security riding on the outcome. What's happening shouldn't be overlooked for the risks it poses to the rest of us. A military full of bribe-hungry general officers is bad for China; a strongman regime with a nuclear-armed command structure falling to pieces in real time is bad for everyone.
May 9, 2026
We've really been hanging on for quite some time with the uncertainty over whether or not the White House is seriously considering an invasion of Cuba
Microsoft's plan to offer early retirement packages
Between macroeconomic concerns and big dreams of powering everything through AI, it seems like all of the big employers are talking about layoffs and job elimination. It's especially big in tech, where Microsoft is joining Meta/Facebook and many others in letting go of employees. ■ Meta/Facebook is taking the layoff approach: 10% of the staff is to be gone by the end of this month. Microsoft is trying a more voluntary approach, offering early retirement packages to anyone whose age plus years of employment equal at least 70. ■ Offering sweet deals to get seasoned employees off the payroll is the kind of idea that only makes sense if headcount is taken to be an objective unto itself rather than a metric or a symptom. And there's no doubt that headcount matters as an expense -- labor is bound to be one of the top expenses anywhere. ■ But there's also something intrinsically short-sighted about cutting ties with the most experienced employees. Some are undoubtedly deadweight, but many are the ones whose knowledge is the most sophisticated and whose intuition is the most refined. By the formula, a person who started working for the company at age 25, with a start date in 2001, would exceed the eligibility number today at age 50. ■ Shortly after a set of admirals and generals were elevated to five-star rank, President Harry Truman signed a law making that appointment permanent for the life of the officer. Age and experience aren't liabilities unless we choose to make them that way.
May 10, 2026
Wildfires in Nebraska this spring scorched a mind-blowing 820,000 acres of land, and the state says the damages were $9.7 million. That's just $11.80 an acre, which seems just astonishingly low. For comparison, the 820,000 acres (which weren't all contiguous, but which burned roughly simultaneously from the same basic causes) if treated as a single wildfire would have been bigger than all but two of California's largest. ■ It's an arresting amount of land -- bigger than Rhode Island. It's about half the area of Ted Turner's legendary holdings, which amounted to about two million acres (and whose disposition raises many questions with Turner's recent death). ■ Yet the wildfires didn't really make much dent in the public consciousness, and the request for disaster-relief funds won't, either. The affected land area was enormous, but the number of people was not. We should, though, take away at least two issues for serious discussion by legislators. ■ First: Despite standing at the apex of wealth and capability across all of human history until now, the United States doesn't have a consistent approach to emergency management. Disasters still too often sneak up on us, we too frequently make civil emergency response the problem of the military, and there's far too much room for favoritism and abuse in the funding process. ■ Second: We are long overdue for some real innovation when it comes to wildfire management, especially on the very tricky urban/wildland interface. Big fires used to start inside urban areas and burn from the center outward (think of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, one among many such fires of the period). Now, wildfires enter urban areas from the outside and cause ferocious emergencies (think of the disasters in Colorado, California, and Hawaii in recent years). Innovation is sorely needed! ■ One of the many problems with a superficial, us-vs.-them framing of issues in the modern "information" economy is that it's hard to put attention on important issues if they lack an obvious partisan framing. It is similarly almost impossible to make headway on issues that take 25 or 50 years to solve when people have TikTok attention spans. We need progress not only on the problems, but on the problems that keep us from seeing the problems.
May 11, 2026
Sometimes, an act is both objectively bad on its own, and also perfectly timed as a metaphor for something much larger. One such example is the practice of "destructive scanning" undertaken by at least one company developing a large language model -- and quite possibly undertaken by others, too. This choice, to scan physical books and then destroy the paper copies, is a serious affront to people who appreciate books as meaningful physical "source code" for human knowledge. ■ Unlike what's found on the Internet, what's found in a physical book can be demonstrably identified with both place and time. A first edition isn't just identifiable by what's printed on the copyright page (though that alone is an important artifact), it can also be traced by such evidence as paper quality, ink types, type faces, and "Ex Libris" markings or due-date slips. Books, like fine art, can be traced with a provenance. Physically destroying a copy just to "transform" it for copyright purposes is an act worthy of heaping piles of scorn. ■ But this act of destructive scanning is also a sharp metaphor for the way some people think about their own behavior, particularly in the sphere of public affairs. All too many people say anything in the moment to attract a maximum of attention, assuming that the track record of their words -- like those books -- will be destroyed and rendered unaccountable as those words are subsumed into the larger "model" they're trying to feed. ■ The offenders in this case aren't necessarily large in number, but they are dismayingly influential. In their Twitter feeds and TikTok streams and other channels of disinformation, they lie, copy, manipulate, exaggerate, fabricate, and instigate, usually for shameless profit and crass influence. Most of them are young enough to expect decades of life ahead of them -- decades during which, historically, they would have been forced to reckon with their earlier words. ■ In the "destructive scanning" universe, though, they say whatever they can to move the needle or attract clout, with no more regard for the consequences of their words five days, five years, or five decades from now than most people devote to what happens after they wash dirt off their hands in a bathroom sink. Words matter and ideas have consequences, but some people are living as if they are shielded from any shadows of the past. They will be proven wrong, sooner or later. But the damage they'll do in the meantime is nothing to ignore.
May 12, 2026
For years, Minnesota newspaper columnist James Lileks has maintained a website dedicated to the loonier recipes of post-war America. What people were out to convince themselves and others to eat in that era often looks downright bizarre to modern Americans. Others occasionally find themselves going down similar rabbit holes. The Internet Archive has a massive collection of cookbooks for just such a meandering investigation. ■ Spend enough time looking through these recipes, and it's hard to escape the realization that the United States was still very much an emerging economy well into the 1960s. GDP per capita was about one-third of what it is today -- roughly about the standard of living in Mexico or Argentina today -- so a whole lot of what's found in artifacts like those cookbooks is basically "How to impress others and look rich on a tight budget". ■ It's good to be conscious of these effects, not to make fun of the past, but to become aware that we live in a continuum. What looked like wealth then may look like poverty now, and that should offer us some sense of context about what looks like wealth today. ■ Real progress is mainly additive. It acts more like a long chain of compounded interest than a lucky pull of a slot machine. Yes, some progress is transformative. But even those moments that seem like tectonic shifts usually result from rules, habits, and investments that build up over time. ■ From time to time, sensible people ought to take in little reminders (like exposure to old-but-not-quite-ancient cookbooks) that we build most progress patiently over time, that we should be humble about our own displays of wealth and success (lest they look ridiculous in future retrospect), and that truly amazing progress is possible over time. Perhaps above all, we need to be reminded that just like the number one rule of making money is to not lose money, the number one rule about making progress is not to undermine progress that has already been made.
May 13, 2026
Anyone who has taken a serious course in the social sciences has most likely encountered an essay question containing some variation on the phrase "Support your argument with evidence". It's a mainstay of AP exams and college courses everywhere, based upon the obvious expectation that an argument without evidence is nothing more than empty words. ■ At the start of the summit in Beijing between the Presidents of China and the United States, Xi Jinping declared, "The two countries should be partners, not rivals", to which his American counterpart replied with praise about the countries' "fantastic relationship". The correct response to both claims is: Support your argument with evidence. ■ "Should" statements are tricky things, especially in translation. It would indeed be very nice if two of the world's most consequential nations could have a pleasant relationship -- but that might only become a "should" upon the condition that both are working in the direction of expanding human liberty, freedom, and opportunity. It's no good to have a partnership if even one of the "partners" is engaged in domestic oppression and external intimidation. ■ Similarly, a "fantastic relationship" is what the United States has historically shared with counterparts like Canada and the United Kingdom. Two countries don't have to share every priority for their relationship to be "fantastic", but it's hard to achieve "fantastic" without mutual respect and at least some harmonization of values. If we get closer to a world in which political prisoners have been freed and secret police stations have been closed, then there might be some drift in the direction of that harmony. But the evidence just isn't there yet. ■ It's hard to say whether there's any point in having expectations of any summit meeting. Words are easy to spout off, and uncritical media coverage is very good at amplifying phrases that sound nice, rather than providing serious analysis. Diplomacy that advances values will always be important, but nobody needs new platforms for empty platitudes.
May 16, 2026
The Long Island Rail Road is shut down due to a labor strike, and if a contract agreement doesn't come together by Monday, it's estimated that 250,000 people will be without their normal way to get from the suburbs to the city and back. ■ What generally goes under-appreciated about good transportation systems (especially mass transportation) is that they flatten the constraints of geography, making it possible for larger numbers of people to enjoy the benefits of metropolitan consolidation. ■ The quip has always gone that investors should buy land because "they're not making any more of it". That may be literally true for the most part (though landfill has been selectively expanding some metro areas for centuries -- about a sixth of Boston has been "created"), but good transportation can render it practically untrue. ■ Once we escape the bounds of immediate walkability, then time in transit preponderantly matters more than physical distance. A bumper-to-bumper 5-mile highway commute and 20-mile light rail commute might each take 30 minutes, and it's the time that really counts (not to mention the quality thereof). ■ Most of the signs point toward it being very unlikely that the United States will find itself much more heavily populated in the future -- the CBO guesses that we'll probably peak at 364 million people around the year 2056. This means that we may not be all that far off from peak crowdedness in most places. Some cities will still boom or bust, but by and large it's probably a fairly safe bet that aside from a few exceptions, most places are about as populated as they're ever going to be. ■ This should nudge us into thinking about how to use transportation networks not to turn places into new giant magnets for newcomers, but rather to make them better-integrated places for people to use their time more efficiently and have quicker access to the jobs, services, and amenities that improve the quality of life. 250,000 people may well be about to feel the pain of having those quality-of-life gains torn from their hands.
May 17, 2026
Among the various ways to collect revenue for government activities, usage fees tend to be uncommonly popular among economists. Charging the fees to the people who actually use those government outputs tends to satisfy a basic appetite for fairness. Though its efficiency is slipping as electric-powered vehicles continue to expand their market share, the gasoline tax has long been an approximation towards a usage fee for road usage. ■ For several reasons, we ought to reconsider how much we depend upon fuel taxes to cover 91% of the Federal Highway Trust Fund. The chronic incapacity of the fuel tax to keep things adequately funded should be a chief concern, and there's no reason to believe that the structural reasons are moving towards a correction. ■ Proposals now to cut or suspend the gas tax as a means to offset higher petroleum prices are fairly predictable moves, but they're no less ill-advised for their predictability. The tax isn't big enough to turn expensive gasoline into anything other than just-slightly-less-expensive gasoline. Because of how the tax is collected, only some of a cut would actually make it to consumers anyway. ■ And, crucially, cutting the tax wouldn't do anything about the need it funds. Dismantling a user fee without replacing it with a better one only means that the funds will have to come from somewhere else -- probably a general fund taken out of income taxes -- where it will almost certainly become even less accountable and only rack up interest costs due to deficit spending practices. ■ User fees shouldn't apply to everything, but they make enormous sense when applied to coad construction, maintanance, and replacement. Suspending them should take something more than public grievance over the significant second-order effects of a major tax.
May 20, 2026
Associate EU membership for Ukraine?
Germany is proposing it as a pathway to full membership someday
SpaceX wants a $1.75 trillion IPO
That would be an utterly incomprehensible market price. The company has been up to some astonishing things, but not $1.75 trillion astonishing.
An airliner requested a diversion after encountering a serious toilet problem, reporting to the ground: "REQUEST DIVERSION. ALL LAVS FULL." If you wanted to see civilization go into a tailspin overnight, just take away the functioning wastewater systems that most Americans take entirely for granted. You can't be so glib in the skies if things make restrooms inoperable. It's a microcosm of what actually matters.
Aaron Ross Powell proposes that the people behind the AT Protocol that makes Bluesky function ought to use their technology along with RSS to bring back the functions that made Google Reader popular with journalists before Google heartlessly killed it in 2013. It may not have been a money-maker of any serious note, but it was a very useful public service, allowing users to organize and follow streams of updates from many different websites through a known, cloud-accessible platform. ■ The community value in Google Reader was that it created an organizational structure that resisted some of the drawbacks of disseminating news and information via social media as we see it today. ■ There was no algorithmic interference; users saw what they chose for themselves. There was no immediacy bias; Google Reader kept track of unread updates and let the user decide when to acknowledge them as "read". There was no intrinsic reward for pushing out loads of volume just to achieve visibility; by organizing and labeling feeds, the user could impose their own editorial preferences instead of rewarding whoever posts most often. ■ No credible or reasonable observer can look at the way social-media algorithms, shameless clickbait, and AI slop dominate the attention economy today and think that we're better off. ■ In the process of shutting down, Google Reader's own outlet recommended some alternatives, but the shutdown both dismantled the meticulous cultivation many users put into organizing their feed readers and smashed the critical mass that had developed around RSS feeds. Claims of "declining usage" notwithstanding, the service still offered lots of value to influential users (like journalists, as noted by Powell). ■ Nobody can or should force private businesses to engage in unprofitable activities, but there remains something to be said for firms that provide public services without getting hung up on how much money they make. Some tasks can only be done at scale by institutions with the internal capacity to get big things done -- or, like Google, the massive customer reach to turn niche interests into sustainable products or services. From time to time, we should offer more of a public cheer for those firms that disregard the siren's song to optimize everything and continue providing a good or service because it's the socially good thing to do.
Meta lays off 10% of employees
Mark Zuckerberg says "we do not expect other company-wide layoffs this year", which seems like a whole lot of hedging under the veil of reassurance
"[W]e find that interaction with sycophantic AI models significantly reduced participants' willingness to take actions to repair interpersonal conflict, while increasing their conviction of being in the right."
May 21, 2026
University of California researchers looking into the nature of ride-sharing say, "Our results imply that ridesharing has decreased U.S. traffic fatalities by 5.2% in areas where it operates." If true, that would be a big and highly commendable effect. ■ Technology is often marveled-at because of big things it makes possible. But it's perhaps equally exciting to see the things that don't happen because technology was doing its work. ■ An intervention that eliminated one of every 20 deaths would be hailed as a significant breakthrough. Here, though, what matters is what didn't happen. Intuitively, it makes sense that if fewer impaired drivers chose to drive and instead chose to take a ride-share, the net total of deaths might fall. ■ But what seems a little remarkable about the ride-share story is that it's hardly new technology; people have been hailing cabs and splitting rides for a long time. What apps like Uber did was remove the obstacles to those requests. It's a lesson well worth understanding: Sometimes all that's needed is to remove the impediments to getting a job done.
May 22, 2026
Whether Alberta should remain part of Canada indefinintely is a question best left to the people of the province. Self-determination shouldn't just be an empty virtue that we praise because it sounds right. ■ The fact it has gotten as far as a referendum to be conducted later this year (technically, a referendum on whether to hold a binding referendum) is a troubling sign that all is not well. ■ No state, province, or region should be run with one foot already out the door. So many things are bound up in reasonable expectations of the continuity of the law, among other things, that even contemplating an exit from national union ought to be reserved for true "Break glass in case of fire" kinds of moments. ■ On the other hand, even though threats of secession ought to be so imposisbly rare that no one would even think of them, anyone running a national-level government ought to be hounded constantly by the thought that they could, in fact, lose it all. ■ In a youth organization, absolutely nothing does more to determine the health of the group than program quality. Parents will look past all sorts of shortcomings in promotions, communications, or recruiting, if their kids are always excited about attending Sunday school, youth choir, or Cub Scouts. ■ Likewise, a government that consistently attends to the priorities of voters, no matter how dull or seemingly inconsequential, has a fighting chance at remaining in office. Resentments big enough to rile up a whole province of people, in numbers large enough to call a referendum on whether to stay, do not just emerge overnight.
May 23, 2026
The final signoff of CBS Radio News has arrived, and though it's not the kind of event that resonates with everyone, it's a passage that remains worthy of note. As one observer noted, among the radio networks in the prime of their influence, CBS was the "serious" one. And though it has been a long time since radio was the predominant medium for news coverage, a combination of inertia and institutional self-regard kept the network serious until the end. ■ As a particularly notable example, the "CBS World News Roundup" wasn't necessary, but it was good -- a commute-length radio news broadcast that really did try to capture the world's stories for a day. It was truly broadcasting in the public interest, and that's the kind of thing being lost. ■ It says something unflattering about our culture that streaming coverage of sports (utterly soaked in the language of betting) can be found at all hours of the day or night, while one of the few remaining heritage radio news network gets euthanized. The periodicity of radio news -- about 5 minutes at the top of each hour -- is reassuring: It says that we don't have to be on high alert at all times, and that we can check in for a professional opinion about what's noteworthy once an hour. Smartphone alerts, by contrast, aren't designed to keep us calm, but rather to keep users in a heightened state of stimulation at all times. ■ With luck, the pendulum will swing back in the other direction sometime soon. Maybe we'll recapture the sense that it's responsible and sanity-preserving to choose to check the news from reputable outlets only periodically, and unplug from the stimulus stream the rest of the time. But as the reputable sources with long histories fade from relevance or are closed down, it becomes harder to have confidence that something good will still be around when that time comes.
May 25, 2026
The more video-game-like that people attempt to make the conduct of warfare, the more we need the solemnity of Memorial Day to jar us back to recognizing the awful human toll invariably associated with warfare. First-person drone footage, sizzle reels cut straight from the front lines, and recruitment ads that appeal to violence rather than to peace all conspire to make the realities seem mainly trivial. ■ Automating the battlefield in Ukraine has transformed expectations of how the next wars will be fought. But it hasn't diminished the real peril to the people in the uniforms of both the aggressor (Russia) and the defender (Ukraine). Their death and injury counts are astonishing. ■ We need a holiday like Memorial Day not just to remind us of the fitting tributes we owe to those who died in war, but equally to compel us to think about alternatives to open combat. Conflicts will never go away, but how we solve them without resorting to bloodshed is a matter worth a considerable amount of energy and resources. Memorial Day acknowledges when that couldn't be done before, but now and always we have a perpetual obligation to seek ways to keep young lives intact.
May 26, 2026
For all of the jokes made not that long ago about a mythical "Infrastructure Week", there really is a serious effort made each May to mark "Public Works Week". The job of a public works department varies from municipality to municipality, but by and large they are organized around maintaining a community's physical infrastructure assets, like streets, stormwater systems, and often utilities like water and wastewater service. ■ What's interesting to contemplate is how that definition could meaningfully and usefully evolve with time. Community-scale solar power, for instance, was economically infeasible not that long ago. Today, it's not only much more affordable than ever, it might actually serve a very sensible public interest to install some forms of it as a means of achieving greater community resilience to various forms of natural and human-made disaster. As infrastructure, it could well fall under the public works umbrella. ■ Similarly, there could be other physical assets that might make economic sense at the community level that look like good candidates for "public works", even if they're not conventional. Improved weather forecasting and structural engineering science have made community-scale storm shelters or safe rooms into useful public assets in some places. Those certainly look like infrastructure. ■ So, potentially, do some approaches to "Housing First" strategies as a response to homelessness. In many cases, the chronically homeless take up temporary shelter in places already under the care of public works agencies (like bridges and sidewalks). It's not unimaginable that some communities could decide to put the upkeep of shelter arrangements under a public works department. ■ As it becomes evident that we may well be closing in on a global population peak but with no letup in the continued expansion of urbanization, it makes sense not to pigeon-hole public works just to what we recognize now, but to think about what physical assets might be useful and desirable now and into the future. Good community resilience planning has never been more important, and changing economic and geopolitical circumstances ought to press us to think about what ideas and projects make sense now that may never have crossed our minds before.
May 28, 2026
Gross salaries and their causes
Confirmation bias can be a powerful drug. It can be downright intoxicating to reach a conclusion first and then go in search of all kinds of reasons to support it. Just such a case appears in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle. ■ Under the headline, "This Cal State program produces some of the country's highest-paid grads", the Chronicle publishes a story that hails the phenomenal success of a four-year nursing degree program at Cal State East Bay, celebrating a report saying that graduates of the program earn the highest starting salaries of any nursing program in the nation. ■ The Chronicle finds several reasons affirming the high incomes, including a strong labor union presence, regulations on nurse-to-patient ratios, and the quality of the program itself. But the story overlooks entirely the causal effects of a massive contributor to those high wages: San Francisco is an eye-wateringly expensive place to live. ■ The extraordinarily high cost of living makes just one tiny appearance in the story, when a current student is described as living with her parents and commuting to campus at a cost of $450 a month. Unfortunately, this is treated merely as a colorful anecdote rather than as an explanation. ■ It matters because one of the best pieces of advice anyone can give to a young person just starting out is, "Maximize the gap between your compensation (in all its forms) and what you have to give up to get it." Anyone can earn a high income -- San Francisco doesn't just have highly-paid nurses, it has some of the nation's best-paid convenience-store clerks, too -- but if that high income evaporates in extremely high rents, time-wasting commutes, and a sky-high cost of living, then the resulting gap may be quite small. ■ Money isn't everything; people are often compensated in psychic rewards, free time, and the gratitude of others. But it's journalistic malpractice to lead a round of cheers for high incomes without deducing that high expenses are a main factor driving those incomes upward. Bloated self-congratulations over high incomes that overlook the inevitability of local market forces (as both a driving factor in those high incomes and a mitigating factor in how much they can be enjoyed) don't really tell the full story.
May 29, 2026
Higher than an unalienable right
Among those who are prone to thinking of government and political power as the main locomotive force of history, there is a high-risk tendency to place one's own happiness above all other things. To the unlettered person, the Declaration of Independence itself gives license to this idea when it proclaims an "unalienable right" to "the pursuit of happiness". Thus, they are satisfied to conclude, "If it makes me happy, then that's the most important thing". ■ This massively misses the point of that document. The pursuit of happiness is a right, to be sure, but it is more important to be good than to be happy. Nobody cares whether Hitler was happy; he chose evil, and that overshadows everything else. ■ The reason that the pursuit of happiness deserves to be documented as a right isn't because being happy is itself a right -- it's because power (usually, but not always, through government) is so often used in bad ways. Some people could be made very happy indeed if they were given unfettered access to the public treasury, unlimited claims to the labor of others, or unconstrained freedom to break the law at will. ■ The moral dimension to life -- the question whether or not to be good -- is dangerous to legislate but absolutely imperative to the success of self-government under the rule of law. The law cannot be enforced at all times everywhere. The vast majority of civilization itself depends upon people choosing to be good for reasons other than the threat of punishment and sometimes in direct opposition to their own happiness. ■ Beyond the imprint of human nature, that's something we can only gain through training and habits, from families and religious institutions, role models and social structures. It's often easy to see who has grown up without those influences, because they appear only to ever ask "Will this make me happy?" and never "Is this a good thing to do?". ■ If we really are in a more atomized age than ever before, then it's going to take some work to make sure the habits of "good" get their due attention. Without them, a few people will surely take advantage of power when they can get it, and by extension, take advantage of everyone else.
May 30, 2026
It wasn't broken, and this isn't a fix
Google's pivot to artificial intelligence is resulting in a general deprecation of its classic link-based results page. While Google isn't alone in this adoption of an AI-everywhere kind of strategy, it's symptomatic of something that's going to be a knowledge and information problem in the coming years. ■ As Emily Bender points out, lists of links actually serve a useful purpose by providing a sort of orientation to the landscape of knowledge on a subject: Not an authoritative single "answer", but rather an array of possible avenues. And that's how information works: Not everything is known, and not every known thing is the product of a universal consensus. It's often just as important to see dissent as it is to see a purportedly "right" answer. ■ For those who were exposed to early iterations of the World Wide Web, there's a certain degree of comfort with uncertainty (there was, believe it or not, a time before everything had a website). And there is also a very sensible understanding that links make the Internet work. Not paid advertising links or SEO-juicing reciprocal links, but real, honestly-meant links to supporting or extending information on a topic. ■ Hyperlinks are the essential footnotes of the Internet. Footnotes are for serious people. Footnotes are how we show our work. Footnotes enforce accountability. You can ignore footnotes, of course. But you shouldn't! An Internet sans hyperlinks is little more than a giant wall covered in advertising posters. ■ Both spreadsheets and social media are much lessened by their basic lack of functional footnotes. Sure, a person can insert links into a social-media thread, but especially now that social-sharing cards force themselves into those threads and interrupt the flow of writing, it's a distraction to do so in a way that a basic hyperlink never was. ■ Things purported as "features" are not always beneficial. Whether it's the usurpation of semi-structured information (like the ten blue links of a classic Google search result) by AI-generated outputs or the conversion of basic links into attention-hogging social-sharing cards, there's a real battle underway not just for the answers people want, but for their very structure. Hyperlinks, the modern footnotes, are part of an unbroken tradition with a multi-century history. We jettison them at our own peril.