Gongol.com Archives: August 2026
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August 1, 2026
Devastating wildfires have encroached into Spokane, Washington, forcing thousands of people to evacuate and probably destroying dozens of structures. The evacuation orders at one point were expanding multiple times an hour, indicating just how quickly the fires were spreading. ■ American cities often suffered huge conflagrations in the 1800s, sparked by human activities taking place in the middle of highly combustible cities. Candles, broken gas pipes, and other human-related causes were common, but innovations like fire hydrants (patented in 1869) and automatic indoor sprinklers (patented in 1879), along with social practices (like insurance policies that rewarded fire prevention) had substantially curbed that type of fire by about the 1920s. ■ When big fires happen in cities today, it's almost always because a wildfire crosses into an urban area from the outside. It's still early in this disaster, but that looks like what happened in Spokane. ■ The evidence is pretty strong that at least some measure of climate warming is here to stay -- irreversible in the short to medium term, no matter what we do to reduce carbon emissions. And even a slight increase in average temperatures is likely to increase the frequency of drought in large parts of the world, which in turn makes it probable that wildfires will grow larger on average than they used to be. It's a pretty dire situation when half a state is covered by an "extreme" fire weather outlook, as happened in Washington at the outbreak of the Spokane fires. ■ Some technological and policy innovations are needed, preferably soon. It just isn't possible to deploy enough firefighting labor, equipment, or water to put down fires that expand to hundreds or thousands of acres that incorporate urban areas. People aren't going to want a return to the old days, when preemptive explosive demolitions were used to create firebreaks. If the macro-scale climate conditions cannot be reversed, then community-scale efforts to deal with the resulting high-risk reality will need to follow.
August 2, 2026
Amsterdam's lesson for New Amsterdam
New York's mayor is making social-media highlight reels out of his campaign to introduce a containerization program for the city's solid waste collections. These "Empire Bins" are electronically locked and are supposed to fight rats. ■ Keeping large urban areas sanitary is a problem of great importance and it's never permanently solved. As we adapt and evolve, so do other parts of nature. Trash containerization has some obvious appeal, considering the way trash bags literally pile up in New York. No plan is perfect, and there are reasons both good and bad to oppose the Empire Bin project. ■ Good reasons? The project will cost $162 million, take scarce parking spaces out of service, and could hinder access to fire hydrants and utility access points (like manholes or valve boxes) in curbside areas. ■ Bad reasons? Because some people think "New York's streets are entropic. Nothing here can exist without promptly getting bashed in, graffiti-ed, or splattered with swill." This attitude, ranking somewhere between defeatism and pure cynicism, opens up no space for a better solution. ■ Amsterdam already has low-profile underground garbage compaction systems that store far more volume than is visible at street level. Could the same be done for New Amsterdam? It's not impossible to imagine, though it would take a kind of mentality of urban innovation that hasn't been in great supply.
The world nearly lost Phil Collins to alcohol addiction in 2023 and 2024. He was drinking so much that his kidneys were failing and had him near death.
Bird cam in Spokane captured extreme speed of fires
(Video) The way huge flames sped across the Spokane area in the course of a single afternoon is really heart-stopping
August 3, 2026
A headline in Wired Magazine promises "All the ways you can make reading on your phone easier". It is a short article -- only about 850 words. Functionally, the advice is fair enough, with a few technical tricks one can use to adjust fonts, reduce on-screen clutter, and manage reading backlogs. ■ The key advice, though, is in the second sentence: "If you've got a lot of text to get through, you might find yourself turning to a Kindle instead, or even a good old-fashioned physical book". No matter how many ways we adapt digital devices for text delivery, the "old-fashioned" print approach has certain insurmountable advantages. Be sure of this: A few hundred years from now, printed books will still disproportionately reward their readers for some of these reasons. ■ Reason #1: The eye and brain, working together, have evolved to prefer reflected light over projected light. Conventional ink-on-paper print products (or the very close replication thereof found in e-ink, like what is used in most Kindle readers) appeal to evolutionary preferences. In the natural world, only a few things actually generate light: Things like the Sun and fire. These things do not convey information, and in fact can be painful to observe for too long. Computer, tablet, and smartphone screens use projected light -- which is no small part of why they cause eye strain, at least some relief from which is found by turning to "night mode" or "eye comfort mode". Any method that requires projected light is going to stand at a structural disadvantage. ■ Reason #2: Printed materials invite interaction with the text in the form of highlighting, marginalia, and other notes that come naturally when performed by hand. They take a different type and amount of coordination and concentration to perform on digital devices, assuming they are even possible (which they often are not). Yes, you can take notes with a browser window. No, it is not as instinctive as underlining a passage in a book using a pen. The greater the cognitive load required to perform the task, the more the reader is taken out of the act of reading and comprehending. ■ Reason #3: What's printed on paper takes on a physical location in space. This can be advantageous on multiple levels: Many people recall where they encountered content as a physical act (e.g., "It was at the bottom of the page, about three pages back..."). Many more retain enough working memory of their reading that their eyes can dart effortlessly back and forth on the page as they re-read passages to compensate for distraction or confusion (e.g., "Hang on...I need to read that again"). Still others benefit from physical layout choices like footnotes, indices, and font sizes (a technique hilariously immortalized in The Onion's "WA-" headline parody). All of these physical devices are basically impossible to replicate if the words have to move on a stationary screen instead of turning along with the page. ■ This is not to deny that digital reading experiences can be improved, nor that some physical reading experiences are terrible. Every experienced reader has been frustrated by type that is spaced poorly, in an illegible font, or spanning unnaturally wide columns that tax the eye's ability to track. But if a fair amount of care and competence are brought to the act of print layout, then reading speed, comprehension, and convenience will almost inevitably and forever favor print over screens.
Will labeling artificial-intelligence products change how people use them?
Red Cross says US blood supply is in crisis
The national supply of O+ blood is down to less than a day's worth
Minnesota takes lead on "nudification" sites
The state has banned sites that create artificial nude images of people.
Cuba's electrical grid in collapse
It's the kind of situation that, if it lingers, could trigger a real humanitarian disaster
AI "conversations" with private user data are breaking out of secrecy and finding their way into search results
Capital One shut down a well-known client
Over money-laundering concerns
August 5, 2026
ComEd is putting solar panels on top of storage units
Americans like having stuff, and even though our houses are bigger than ever, they often still don't have enough room for all of the stuff we want to keep. So many of us turn to rental storage units, which dot the landscape all over. ■ Self-storage facilities tend to have three interesting characteristics: They're usually fairly close to population centers (nobody wants to travel too far to get to their stuff), they're generally broad and flat (the simpler the layout, the cheaper to construct), and they'll tend to be found in the neighborhoods on the lower half of the local rent scale (near things like railroad tracks and highways, rather than where the land costs more per square foot). ■ Commonwealth Edison (or ComEd), the largest electric utility in Illinois, has found an interesting way to make those storage facilities more useful: By putting large rooftop solar sites on them. One of the characteristic properties of a market economy is that it rewards moving things from lower states of value to higher ones, and this is a very clever way to make otherwise unproductive roof area into something useful. ■ It's hard to think of a single drawback: Community-level power generation is good for the utility because it reduces transmission losses (especially nice when it can be done renewably, without generating any pollution). It's good for the property owner, who presumably profits directly from some sort of rental fee arrangement with the utility. And it's good for the local municipality, since the solar installations presumably increase the taxable value of the property (in addition to bringing higher reliability to the electrical utility service). ■ Like putting solar panels over irrigation canals and strategically shading certain crops with solar panels to gain dual-use "agrivoltaics", upgrading storage unit roofs by adding solar facilities seems like a no-brainer after the idea gets into the wild. With a little luck, the idea ought to spread quickly.
August 6, 2026
A YouGov survey of nearly 16,000 American adults asked, "If you had a choice between instantly receiving $50,000 or flipping a coin for a 50% chance to win $1 million, which would you pick?" According to the most mathematically rational approach -- the same one used to decide things like the cost of homeowners insurance or which cards to play in blackjack -- it's a question of expected values: Expected value #1 is a straight $50,000, while expected value #2 is worth 50% of $1,000,000, or $500,000. If faced with a series of repeated choices, the person choosing to maximize the expected value could reasonably be expected to come out ahead. ■ But among the things unaccounted-for in that approach is this: A guaranteed outcome triggers the endowment effect. If one option is literally a sure thing, then the baseline moves -- suddenly, option #1 becomes "Do nothing and you're happier than you were before you started" and option #2 becomes "Pay $50,000 for a lottery ticket that has a 50% chance of rewarding you $950,000, plus your original deposit." ■ "Pay $50,000 for a lottery ticket" sounds like a much more aggressive choice. Loss often hurts more than how good it feels to win. Warren Buffett's heuristic is "Don't lose money", and that's worked out to be terrific advice for those who have followed him for the long run. ■ Thus, even though there are those who would like to over-interpret the results of such a poll, there's nothing alarming in the results that say 65% of Americans would take the guaranteed money. It may not be the expected-value-maximizing choice, but it makes lots of sense when viewed from the perspective of time after the "guaranteed thing" has in fact paid out. From that angle, it's hard to see how 25% of adults would agree to pay $50,000 for a lottery ticket.
August 7, 2026
High temperatures are too often treated a nuisance rather than a health hazard, but heat-related deaths are literally a perennial problem numbering in the hundreds to thousands in the United States, plus many more around the world. Getting people to take action by taking shelter in places like cooling centers can be difficult, whether because of pride, transportation obstacles, poor calibration of risk, or other causes. ■ Anyone who has experience with troubleshooting technical issues knows that, most of the time, problems don't occur in isolation. Root out one problem and you're likely to discover a related one. Wisdom lies in recognizing that causes and effects come in orders beyond just one. ■ As we grapple with important questions like "How can we get more people into cool locations when their health is at risk?", we'll find that there are upstream questions of social science to be answered. But we also need to look downstream: Any time we aggregate lots of people under a shared roof, we need to consider not just the temperature of the air but also its purity. ■ In 2020, health concerns tended to fixate on the quality of the air (and the risk it contained coronavirus) rather than the temperature. Knowing that dreadful contagious diseases often spread by air, and that we'll never be done with the fight against them, it emerges that cooling the air and regulating its quality are related in important ways that are better addressed when the situation isn't especially perilous.
August 8, 2026
A bus driver noticed a drone flying low over the Leipzig airport and kicked it out of the sky. A local government official says "[I]t's not a model to be emulated. Letting us know would be enough." ■ Perhaps not, though. No matter how efficient German anti-terrorism units may be, the drone was rigged with explosives. The German interior minister says it wasn't the work of amateurs, and it represents "a new threat scenario". The situation appears to be one of a sophisticated adversary bringing tools of warfare deep into Europe. ■ The weapon was found next to a Ukrainian aircraft, which is almost certainly more than just a chance coincidence. It is all the more reason to see what has been obvious for nearly five years of unjustified war against Ukraine: The Kremlin isn't interested in constraining its use of warfare. All of Europe is under threat. ■ "We're not at war, but we are the daily target of hybrid warfare", says the German interior minister. He may have been using "we" to describe Germany alone, but it's hard to believe that the situation in any neighboring state is any different. We have entered a very stupid and very counterproductive era, in which war and war-like conflicts are going to swallow vast resources and waste the time of countless brilliant minds who could have been doing more productive things. ■ But, alas, they won't, because they will be needed to push back and maintain a defensive perimeter in all kinds of realms (from kinetic weapons to cybersecurity to information warfare), all because some misanthropes in a few powerful places would rather set the world on fire than reap the benefits of peaceful ordered liberty. The people of the world deserve better.
August 9, 2026
Big business can still lose money
The GAO has issued a report on the cost of collegiate athletics that contains this stunning pair of highlights: "Across DI colleges, 94 percent of athletics programs, including 49 of the 69 Power colleges, spent more than they generated in revenue in the 2023-24 academic year [...] All DII athletics programs spent more than the revenue they generated in the 2023-24 academic year." Considering the revenues raised through broadcasting rights, on-site advertising and sponsorship, concessions, tickets, merchandise, and booster club fundraising, it's pretty incredible that such a very big business can be so very unprofitable. ■ There's good reason for college athletics to exist as a common practice, of course: It provides a common base for entertainment, offers publicity to colleges, gives alumni a reason to feel bound to the alma mater, and (theoretically, at least) encourages the formation of a well-rounded person. ■ But these things are also not exclusive to athletics; collegiate notoriety and common cause can be found in the arts, social events, publications, community service, and academics. As with all such things, balance is essential. ■ It's hard not to see certain expenses as outliers, as when the report notes, "The 14 highest spending Power colleges each spent more than $38 million on coaching." That's a lot of money to spend on management for a pursuit with wildly uncertain returns on investment and a very high rate of unprofitability. ■ Much like the case with economic-development spending, it's hard for any individual institution to opt out of the practice of high spending on athletics, no matter how irrational the behavior might be. It's a real collective-action problem: Nobody has the incentive to rationalize those budgets if it would mean taking the risk of irritating alumni and others by under-performing on the field of play. But it would still make sense for cooler heads to weigh in before the subject becomes yet another matter for overheated political rhetoric.
US farmers hope ethanol demand overseas will support prices
BMW feeds Spider-Man ads into cars, honking off drivers
Maybe what we need is more passive radar
August 10, 2026
Low oil stocks and high-risk behaviors
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve has dropped to its lowest level since 1983, following six straight months of net shrinkage in the stores. It's now at less than half of the peak volume stored when it hit full capacity in 2009. ■ In and of itself, the decline is not necessarily a cause for alarm. The reserve is supposed to cover 90 days' worth of imports, and for the last five or six years, the US has been a net petroleum exporter -- a situation that was basically unimaginable when the Strategic Petroleum Reserve was created in 1975. But with the war between the US and Iran continuing its unsteady path and the hostilities around the Strait of Hormuz specifically disrupting a quarter of the world's seaborne oil trade, it's a time to be alert to uncertainties and contingencies. ■ The United States has, for instance, an enormous nuclear-powered fleet of submarines and aircraft carriers. But the US Navy has about 150 non-nuclear combat surface ships. They don't run on coal, and they aren't sailboats, either: They need petroleum-based fuels. ■ The Naval Petroleum Reserves have been fully divested for years, and though ongoing domestic production of petroleum is strong, what would happen if we simultaneously experienced a global supply crunch (like the current one) and a significant naval conflict (like an abrupt invasionary expedition in the South China Sea)? ■ Even if the Strategic Petroleum Reserve isn't primarily intended to serve a strategic defense purpose, it still sends a bad signal about readiness when we run low on both petroleum reserves and reserves of munitions at the same time. An enormous factor in conflict deterrence is credibility, and it's a lot easier to be credible when a seemingly inexhaustible supply of resources stands ready. ■ Our behavior may be sending highly undesirable signals to the rest of the world, and those signals run the risk of inviting adversarial behavior that benefits nobody in the long run. We should heed the advice of Dwight Eisenhower: "[A]s long as there persists a threat to freedom, [free nations] must, at any cost, remain armed, strong, and ready for the risk of war."
August 11, 2026
Anytime a new technology breaks through to the mainstream, there are bound to be adopters who will waste no time in taking it too far. Social media broke through to the public consciousness and promptly we were awash in "social media consultants". Cell phones added Bluetooth connections and soon airports and conference centers everywhere were full of people physically (and almost surgically) attached to their earpieces. Now, we have artificial intelligence and a host of people all too eager to take it too far just the same. ■ A writer at Axios has taken to extolling the virtues of AI as a "reading buddy" that makes it easier to process "the way many of us actually read books". Behold, says the writer: AI can "keep track of plots and characters". ■ The overreaching for meaning is painful. Sure, you can ask AI to generate a cast of characters or a plot summary -- but for most widely-read books, one already exists on Wikipedia or in another reference somewhere. The Book of Ecclesiastes gets it right: "What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done. Nothing is new under the sun!" ■ The Axios way of reporting -- what they have trademarked as "Smart Brevity" -- both attempts to make these old practices sound new and offers a prime example of the error itself. It is nothing new to suggest that writers ought to get to the point: Clear, crisp, memorable writing has been celebrated since long before Ben Franklin started printing punchy aphorisms. ■ Nor is the value of good layout anything new. Axios really just follows two classic rules. Rule #1: Keep columns of text narrow and space the lines generously. Newspapers and magazines have followed these principles for many, many decades. Line spacing even has the lovely trade jargon "leading", based on the strips of lead once used to separate lines of type. ■ Rule #2: Give the eye convenient anchoring points. (This is why people like bullet lists!) There's nothing new about this, either: Old books are full of initials, pilcrows, numbered paragraphs, and other eye-catching wayfinding marks. ■ If you're finding it hard to read a book, especially if it's a well-regarded piece of time-honored literature, then there's a non-zero chance that it's the fault of sloppy layout or lazy typography. None of this is new and none of it is solved by adopting an AI reading buddy. It's solved by attention to detail and perhaps a dose of reader self-discipline.
August 13, 2026
Don't anthropomorphize AI agents
Some metaphorical license is at play when a Wired Magazine writer says "AI agents aren't evil -- they're just a bit too keen to please." The real point is that AI agents, which are really just sophisticated complexes of program-like functions, are effectively programmed to try to resolve problems as they are assigned. ■ This means we should not be surprised when they act in ways that cause problems, break rules, or appear immoral: There doesn't appear to be any effort to impose moral training on them, so they behave as though they have unrelenting task focus. This is a problem, because people are all too often anthropomorphizing them -- treating "Claude" and "Gemini" and their ilk like they might treat people of the same names, as sentient beings. ■ And that's a very big problem for a reason also highlighted by Wired: "AI agents do not learn the kind of moral reasoning exhibited by even small children." We expect sentient beings to have feelings and moral capacities: Who hasn't seen a dog with a guilty look? (Even that look, though, is more a biological instinct than evidence of moral reasoning.) ■ We need a great deal more habituation around drawing boundaries around our expectations of technology, as well as our expectations of the people furnishing that technology. Thinking of an AI agent as a pal with a given name instead of the product manufactured (however digitally) by a business with consumer-safety responsibilities is a huge mistake. The computers don't have souls, but people who do have them need to know better.
ISU expands "Iowa Cyber Resiliency Initiative"
The thing people have to remember about cybersecurity is that adversaries aren't necessarily targeting rationally for maximum impact -- they're often just looking for easy targets. So even though they might be theoretically capable of leveraging greater "expected value" of damage by hitting large institutions, there's very little reason to think that they're going to walk away from smaller-scale targets (like small towns or school systems) just because fewer people will be affected. The ease of compromising the target is certainly nearly as much of a factor as the potential impact. Thus every organization needs to have similar levels of interest in cybersecurity protections, and if they don't have the internal resources to handle the need, they probably need help like the kind ISU is offering.
August 14, 2026
Reports of serious deterioration of conditions and morale aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln have been reported in credible sources like the Navy Times and Stars and Stripes. Those reports would be dangerous to ignore and even worse to dismiss. ■ Social conditions like crew morale may be mostly subjective, but it's objectively true that the aircraft carrier has been deployed for more than eight months, longer by a quarter of a year than originally anticipated. ■ Everyone's choices are bounded, in part, by the appeal and availability of alternatives. The people on board an American aircraft carrier are specialists and technicians, not mere drones (in the sense of bees, not UAVs). They are the products of a sophisticated, all-volunteer military force in a technologically advanced age. They are people with other options. ■ Of course, part of the promise of service in the military is fair pay and transferable career skills. But, even more than that, we implicitly promise character: That a veteran with an honorable discharge leaves with more character than the newly enlisted or commissioned recruit. But character isn't a one-way projection. It acts as a mirror, reflected off the surrounding people and environment. ■ If we want an honorable fighting force, high-quality recruits, and an effective defensive shield in a world of ambitious adversaries, then we (through our elected officials) have to ensure that both environment and leadership rise to the level that will form the right outcomes. If those fall short, then it's imperative to change course before it's too late.
August 15, 2026
For no small period of time, some people have been forecasting a world of "water wars", fought over access to the raw supply of water much like some countries may be thought to go to war over resources like oil. Thus far, at least, these wars have not come to pass, which is a good thing. We have, however, witnessed an alarming number of cases in which water has become a weapon of wars fought over other causes. ■ Desalination plants have been targeted in the Middle East. Russia has drained reservoirs and viciously attacked freshwater infrastructure in its war against Ukraine. Cyberattacks have gone after Canadian and American water systems. ■ The problem on the global scale isn't exactly one of simple water scarcity. It's more a problem of supply and transportation, getting the right types of water to where it's needed and away from where it's not, and the needs may vary considerably within a short period of time. ■ Almost no culture on Earth has better claim to that kind of knowledge than the Dutch, and their present condition may be illustrative. Low-lying Holland no longer just needs to pump water out, it also needs to be able to combat drought, which is a condition without vast historical precedent that is becoming more common. ■ This should alarm us and be a call to action. If even the Netherlands is having to reassess the meaning of water security (from too much to too little), a similar reassessment is going to be a matter for everyone, worldwide.
August 17, 2026
One of the best reasons to become familiar with paper maps is to gain an understanding of scale and relationships that aren't readily apparent from their digital counterparts. The "Measure Distance" tool on Google Maps can be pretty helpful, and the ability to scroll in and out with nothing more than the spin of a mouse wheel (or the pinch of a touchscreen) can be very handy. But actively engaging with a printed map -- or, better yet, a series of them within an atlas -- opens the door to conceptualization in a way that a right-here-right-now digital map cannot. ■ For example, it's not necessarily intuitive that Seoul is only 200 to 250 miles from two different sites in mainland China, and only about 400 miles from the nearest part of Russia. Shenyang, a Chinese city of 9 million people, is 350 miles away (as the crow flies), and Beijing is just shy of 600 miles in the distance. ■ These are, in modern terms, very short distances. From New York to Washington, DC, is just a little more than 200 miles. Los Angeles to San Francisco is about 350 miles. Chicago to Fargo is, like Beijing to Seoul, only about a 600-mile hop. All are distances easily crossed by airplanes in times measurable more precisely in minutes than hours. ■ Among many potential nightmare scenarios for our future is this: Driven by irrational motives, North Korea launches an invasion of South Korea. The invasion itself doesn't have to be successful for China to step in, declaring the region to be within its "sphere of influence", and asserting dominance over North Korea. China has been propping up North Korea economically for some time, so it's not unreasonable to imagine a domineering reaction. (All this, of course, involving multiple parties with nuclear weapons.) ■ What stops China from going farther than the DMZ? The deterrent effect of America's very real and tangible defensive alliance with South Korea. But deterrence depends upon credibility, and that credibility has taken a sudden and serious hit. So serious, in fact, that South Korea's president promptly reiterated a call for greater domestic control of its defense forces than the country has had since the 1950s. ■ Alliances should never be taken lightly. It's not cheap to maintain an overseas presence the way the United States does in South Korea, but the cost of prevention should never be examined in isolation. What always matters is the cost (whether potential or likely) of what's being prevented.
August 18, 2026
No news can be really bad news
It's always worth paying attention when journalists come right out and point fingers without apology. "Stars and Stripes", which is supposed to be an independent source of news and information for the armed forces of the United States, reported the retirement of its publisher like this: "Max D. Lederer Jr., the longtime publisher of Stars and Stripes, announced his retirement Tuesday, ending a three-decade career at the news organization amid Pentagon efforts to expand oversight over its operations and content." Later, the report adds, "His retirement comes after the Defense Department in April fired the publication's ombudsman, a role charged by Congress with safeguarding the newspaper's editorial independence." ■ Dwight Eisenhower, who indisputably knew how to win wars, remarked in his memoirs of World War II: "I believed that the proper attitude of the commander toward representatives of the press was to regard them as quasi staff officers". Eisenhower knew that good journalism wasn't just something for the public at home. Tough, fair-minded reporting also provides commanders with information they need to know both from and about their subordinates. ■ News doesn't always travel to where it's needed. Information needs to reach those at the top, and even the lowliest private has the right to be commanded by those who seek the full picture, not just rosy sentiments that reinforce what top officers want to hear. ■ The truth sometimes hurts, but ignorance hurts more. Eisenhower knew it: "In the handling of the press, the American practice was to provide every facility that would permit an individual to go wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted. While this imposed upon us some additional administrative burdens, it paid off in big dividends because of the conviction in the minds of all that there was no attempt to conceal error and stupidity. These, when discovered, could be promptly aired and therefore did not grow into the festering sores that would have resulted from any attempt at concealment."
August 20, 2026
A degree of harm is still harm
Just as much as a full-blown marketing tsunami has built around the adoption of artificial intelligence tools, a loud cottage industry has emerged to promote a vigorous counter-narrative. For some, it's not enough simply to be skeptical: Only full-blown catastrophism will do. ■ The catastrophist says that because of AI: No one will read anymore! No one will believe anything they see anymore! Everyone will fall for fakes, propaganda, and misinformation! Nobody will know how to write anymore! ■ Because they go too far, their catastrophic claims are readily dismissed. And that's a very big problem. The all-or-nothing tendency risks crowding out the much more modest but much more likely claims with which we really should grapple, thoughtfully and critically. ■ The catastrophic projections are too much. But their 5% versions are both more realistic and potentially more frightening. What if 5% of kids grow up to be functionally illiterate because of AI over-exposure? What if 5% of voters believe anything in their tainted information diets without applying any critical thought? What if well-meaning people dismiss 5% of the things they used to take seriously because their mental filters are calibrated too high? What if 5% pure nonsense creeps into the mainstream of published literature and commentary (and search results) under the names of legitimate writers who nevertheless use AI carelessly and without disclosure? ■ A degree of harm is still harm, but mitigation of harm is not the same as binary approval or disapproval of a thing. It's harder to speak in nuance, but generally much more important. The telegraph, the automobile, and the Internet all arrived without causing society to crumble -- but they caused very big changes that should neither have been catastrophized nor overlooked. The extreme versions of events tend to distract us, though, from the 5% outcomes that are vastly more likely to occur.
August 21, 2026
Carl Sagan popularized the maxim, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". And, as heuristics go, it's not a bad policy. If Sam says, "I had a delicious tiramisu last night", and Chris says, "I demonstrated cold fusion in my apartment last night", then Chris should face a much higher evidentiary standard than Sam. ■ Similarly, extraordinary recognition should require extraordinary merit. We do not use the same standards for naming park benches and national parks. This does not stop people from making contests out of individual name choices, like whether William McKinley really deserves to eclipse the traditional name of Denali. At least, though, we can recognize the need for elevated standards. ■ Doris Miller's actions on the day Pearl Harbor was attacked were worthy of extraordinary recognition, not because we can do any more to applaud him in life, but because he stands as a lofty role model worth emulating. Plans to name an aircraft carrier after him seem like a worthy way to recognize him (with the intent of urging sailors to live up to a similar standard). ■ Talk of rescinding that name would be a serious mistake. Names aren't everything, but they do stand for something. How we choose to apply those names says a lot about what we profess to value most.
August 23, 2026
Writing in the Guardian, an American psychotherapist laments that he sees many male clients who suffer from what he diagnoses as unresolved grief. He traces it to this cause: "When a man finally reaches the future he has spent years imagining and it fails to satisfy him, disappointment can harden into bitterness." Curiously, he says he addresses these feelings by "turning towards this grief and exploring it with self-compassion". ■ That much may be all well and good, but it seems oddly incomplete. Whether it's really "grief" or not, the sensation of ennui isn't anything new (Merriam-Webster cites the word itself all the way back to 1732). Surely some people really do need to be taught to show self-compassion, but there's something much larger missing from the story. ■ If the painful sensation really comes from a sense of underfulfillment, then the solution probably lies in a perspective voiced by Viktor Frankl: "The more one forgets himself -- by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love -- the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself." ■ Lots of people can feel happy, at least in a passing sense, when surrounded by material trappings. (Who can be grumpy while riding a jet ski?) But fulfillment is a different sensation, much bigger and more durable than fleeting happiness, and it comes from doing things that are meaningful and worthwhile. ■ That's a lesson we should try to teach people as early as possible in life: Not in the sense that they can only be happy by subsuming themselves to the will of a larger group (because that would be untrue), but in the sense that material considerations alone are usually incomplete for creating a really well-rounded sense of satisfaction in life. ■ Everyone does better with a sense of purpose, and it's really hard to discover a purpose that doesn't contain at least some element of love or service to others. People could quite literally save a fortune on therapy sessions later by adopting a quest for meaning much sooner.
Kellogg's closes cereal plant in Omaha that opened in 1942
A Creighton University study estimates 8,000 jobs in food processing have been eliminated in the Midwest in the last 12 months
At the pace of a carrier pigeon
Camera glasses create all kinds of conflicts
Like what is reasonable for a company to review for "quality assurance"
August 24, 2026
One of the simplest concepts to understand in all of human affairs is that we each have different arrays of skills, gifts, and talents. While some are learned and others come naturally, the more we can concentrate on those things we do comparatively well, the better off we tend to be. ■ Maybe Mark Twain could have been a great accountant, but it's better that he focused on writing instead. Taylor Swift might fold a mean paper crane, but (at least as a professional pursuit) she should probably focus on recording music instead. And a great heart surgeon should probably hire someone else to run the woodchipper. ■ All of this is a matter of comparative advantage, an economic concept so important that Greg Mankiw, the author of the preeminent introductory textbook on economics, listed it as the #1 economic principle he would try to imprint on as many minds as possible. ■ It not only serves to explain why individuals should specialize in what they do best, it also succinctly explains why trade generally makes most participants better off. This isn't new; David Ricardo explained it in 1817, and we've lived in a world brimming with examples ever since. ■ Trade comes with friction, of course, and just because almost everyone ends up better off on net doesn't mean that some people won't be set back along the way. But, overwhelmingly, if two entities (generally countries, but sometimes regions, provinces, states, cities, or city-states) have generally comparable foundations of law, then the freest possible movement of goods, money, ideas, and people will tend to make everyone better off, on balance. ■ Legal compatibility matters because a wild structural imbalance can be introduced if one side of a trade allows for slave labor, flagrantly steals intellectual property, or commits acts of war to steal resources. Those circumstances aren't reflections of authentic comparative advantage. ■ But when generally comparable rules are observed on both sides of a trade, free exchange lets comparative advantages mount, and those results are ultimately measured in wealth. Not only that, they tend also to be reflected in a general goodwill -- the kind of thing Adam Smith identified in 1776. Starting fights where compatibility once prevailed is self-defeating and foolish, and ultimately impoverishes virtually everyone.
August 25, 2026
The Scottish poet Robert Burns surely didn't have a buxom country superstar in mind when he first penned the phrase that ultimately became "a gentleman and a scholar" (in Burns's turn of phrase, the order was reversed), but few celebrities can make more rightful claim to the title of "gentleperson and scholar" than Dolly Parton. ■ Dexter Holland of The Offspring, with his Ph.D. in molecular biology, and Brian May of Queen, with his Ph.D. in astrophysics, are both recognizable scholar-celebrities by conventional measures. But Dolly Parton was a different kind of scholar: Formally educated only through high school, she was honored as a doctor of humane letters by the University of Tennessee for her dedication to advancing literacy. ■ For three decades, she funded and promoted the "Imagination Library" to send a free book a month to young children. It was an act of homage to her father, whose own illiteracy she saw first-hand as a limitation on his life. One thesis written on the effects of the Imagination Library program reported real evidence of important effects on literacy and cognitive development. ■ She may have been famous in no small part for her colorful and sometimes cheerfully irreverent personality, but we find the gentlelady in her acts: The books for children, the funding of medical research, and the quiet reinvestment in communities, among other honorable works. ■ At a time when other rich and famous people are feverishly chasing immortality by biohacking and putting their names on buildings, Dolly Parton has easily assured herself of a much more favorable place in popular memory by choosing the purely human route of being a gentleperson and a scholar.
August 26, 2026
Whatever the post-modernists might try to tell you, art isn't about perfectly uninhibited expression. Art is in the constraints. The limitations, boundaries, and rules of art confer most of its appeal. ■ Even classic cartoons observe limitations -- and not just in the strict sense of ink and paint on celluloid. Chuck Jones, who directed many of the best-known Looney Tunes shorts, wrote that Bugs Bunny was only successful as a character when he was constrained by certain rules. ■ Among those rules, Jones wrote: "His adversary must be worthy of him, for there is nothing heroic about beating an opponent who is in no position to beat you." Additionally, "Bugs never engages any opponent without reason". Once engaged in a conflict, "his wits are his basic weapon; he tries to avoid physical conflict when possible". The first rule of all? "Bugs must always be provoked rather than being the aggressor." ■ The cartoons may be vintage, but it's no real stretch to say that Bugs Bunny -- specifically, the Bugs Bunny who follows those rules -- is the most American pop-cultural character of the last 100 years. ■ And it's a crying shame that too many Americans (including many with power and influence) don't recognize that the constraints were what made the animated hero, because the same constraints are what draw the line between heroism and villainy among us today. If you can't even aspire to the honor code of a cartoon rabbit, then you're probably not one of the good guys.
August 27, 2026
Go searching for the quote "People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel", and Google is likely to tell you with full AI-driven confidence that it comes from Maya Angelou. It won't cite an original source, but it will confidently follow up with bullet points under self-important headers like "Meaning of the Quote" and "How to Apply It". ■ Perhaps Google omits a reliable attribution because it isn't from Maya Angelou, at least not originally. The indispensable website Quote Investigator helpfully identifies the originator as one Carl W. Buehner. The misattribution is failure enough: Knowledge worth keeping is worth keeping well, and errors confidently delivered can easily eclipse or squeeze out the truth. ■ But it's almost worse to be "told" by a computer program what to think about a quotation that is fundamentally about human feelings. The entire point of a quotation like this is to cause reflection. Reflection is a process that takes place internally; it is not a list of bullet points to be memorized. ■ Information technologies make it ever easier for us to figure out how to do things and understand why they happen. We have entered an age of the "Teach-Yourself Economy", in which the motivated learner can figure out how to do countless things through independent study. The barriers to "how to" have fallen in so many places and in so many ways as to be truly astonishing. ■ As it becomes easier to figure out "how", though, it also becomes much more important to thoughtfully consider "why". Aphorisms and proverbs exist because we humans need to reflect on meanings and reasons. That's far different from merely regurgitating explanations or suggestions in "how-to" format. ■ There's a temptation to call it reductionism when Google (or any other service) uses AI to offer purported explanations for deeper thoughts on what makes for meaning. But it's really something even worse: A misdirection. Nobody needs a checklist entitled "How to Love Grandma" -- but we often do need to be reminded that real and abiding care for others is quite central to the meaning of life. Any sense of "intelligence" that doesn't distinguish between the two and know better than to put the wrong one first probably shouldn't be called intelligence at all.
August 30, 2026
One of the aspects of life we too easily overlook is the way healthy one-on-one contact makes people feel. There's a reason why therapy sessions, massage appointments, romantic dinners, and countless other interactions are so widely desired. It feels good on a deep and primal level to have another person take interest and focus their sole attention on you. ■ Of course, there are exceptions: Invasive medical procedures, for instance. But even in the medical field, there's very little that patients seem to want more than to just have someone make eye contact and listen empathetically. A recent article in the British Medical Journal called the "ability to demonstrate compassion and empathy" a "vital professional competency" for doctors. ■ The realization that we often have involuntary physical reactions to empathetic one-on-one attention is an important one to really internalize. It's one of those important signs that we exist as both body and soul, no matter how mysterious the workings of that "soul" portion remain. ■ It's not just doctors who need this reminder, either. The seductive quality of tools like chatbots lies not just in the tendency to validate what the human user expresses, but in giving the impression of the same focused, intimate attention of a one-on-one interaction with another human. The interaction may be synthetic, but it tickles some of the same sensations. ■ To those who are sufficiently aware of their surroundings, that synthetic "attention" isn't very fulfilling. But as a society, we need to consider how much emphasis we place on making sure that people get the real thing from other real people. And we had better grapple with it quickly, because lots of people aren't sufficiently aware of their surroundings, which can lead to problems exactly of the type Bill Gates flagged in his top three dangers of AI in his new essay. ■ These are not problems easily solved by institutions or rules. They are, however, extremely important for discussion among people who care about other individual people. The technology isn't going to become worse, only faster and more convincing. The answers will need to come from people.