Gongol.com Archives: July 2026
July 22, 2026
Always keep a human in the loop
Someone on an independent gubernatorial campaign in Nebraska picked a campaign logo with the shape of the state all wrong. It's immediately evident how wrong the shape is -- plainly, grindingly wrong. ■ The mistake, like many today, is almost certainly a case of the sloppy use of AI. A child could have drawn a better outline with a fat crayon and tracing paper over a paper map (or, with only a bit more talent, by creating a vector graphic layered over a raster image file of a state map from the public domain). ■ Van Halen notoriously kept an odd provision in their concert rider: That M&M's should be furnished for backstage snacking, but under no circumstances should any brown ones appear. It wasn't because they had anything against the brown M&M's (which taste just like the others, after all). The "brown M&M's test" was their way of quickly detecting who had read the paperwork thoroughly and who had not. It really is an elegant test. ■ The same principle applies here: Look for situations where people fail to check obvious details. That's generally a warning sign that something much larger has been overlooked, as well. (And getting the outline of a state utterly wrong but sticking it in a campaign logo anyway? That's an obvious detail.) ■ An old adage says, "To err is human; to really foul things up requires a computer." We're in a whole new phase of that same old truth: Humans need to be in the decision-making loop for just about anything that matters, because unchecked computer errors can really, really foul things up. But extra woe unto those humans who either don't have the sense to recognize giant errors or don't have the discipline to check the work.
MidAmerican Energy praises Iowa's regulatory structure for making large energy consumers (like data centers) pay their own way for infrastructure and commit to decade-long usage agreements
Broadcast networks aren't licensed
They may own individual stations (which are licensed) and they certainly do furnish programming to licensed stations owned by others, but the networks themselves (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, PBS) aren't licensed by the FCC. Anyone threatening that their "licenses" should be revoked simply doesn't know what they're talking about. And to threaten them with any kind of punishment for choosing not to broadcast a political address is risible.
Russia is importing oil from India
Russia, which possesses vast oil reserves of its own, cannot meet domestic demand -- in no small part due to highly effective Ukrainian attacks on the refinery infrastructure. So Russia is importing oil from India, revealing its own shortcomings. It does, however, shed light on a shortcoming in judgment from India, where wariness of Russian aggression really ought to count for something. India's global neighborhood is full of countries that have had real suffering under Russian imperialism.
