American Vulcan

The facts of Palmer Luckey’s life are so uniquely bizarre—combining elements of fantasy with lunacy and also world-altering change—that they could be printed on magnetic poetry tiles, rearranged in an endless number of indiscriminate combinations by a drooling baby, and yet every time, still manage to convey something significant and true.

Let me show you: Luckey is the owner of the world’s largest video game collection, which he keeps buried 200 feet underground in a decommissioned U.S. Air Force nuclear missile base—which is the kind of thing a man can afford to buy when he single-handedly turns virtual reality from the laughingstock of the technology industry into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise by inventing the Oculus Rift in a camper trailer parked in the driveway of his parents’ duplex in Long Beach, California, where at 19 years old he lived alone and survived on frozen burritos and Mucho Mango AriZona tea.

Or: After selling Oculus to Facebook for $2.7 billion and then getting fired by Mark Zuckerberg for making a $10,000 donation to a pro-Trump troll group dedicated to “shitposting in real life,” Luckey tried his hand at building a nonprofit private prison chain that only gets paid when ex-prisoners stay out of prison. After he decided that would require too much lobbying work, he attempted to solve the obesity epidemic by making food out of petroleum products centrifuged out of the sewer system—a perfectly delicious and low-calorie idea, he maintains, which he only ditched because of the “marketing nightmare” of persuading people to eat remanufactured sewage. In the end, he decided instead to found Anduril Industries, a defense technology startup that makes lethal autonomous weapons systems. It is now valued at $14 billion.

Another: In his spare time, when he is not providing U.S. Customs and Border Patrol with AI-powered long-range sensors, or Volodymyr Zelenskyy with drones to attack high-value Russian targets, or winning first place in the Texas Renaissance Festival’s costume contest with historically meticulous renderings of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn sewn and stitched by his wife, Nicole—who’s been at his side for 16 of his 31 years on earth—Luckey recently built a bypass for his peripheral nervous system to experiment with giving himself superhuman reflexes; vestibular implants to pipe sounds into his skull so that instead of having to call him and wait for him to pick up, Anduril employees could just pick up a designated Palmer Phone and talk straight into his head; and a virtual reality headset that—by tying three explosive charges to a narrow-band photosensor that can detect when the screen flashes red at a specific frequency (i.e., GAME OVER)—kills you in real life when you die in a video game.

Would you like one more? Of course you would: In his private underground workshop garage on Lido Isle in Newport Beach, California, Luckey has built an unenclosed toilet on the wall of his workspace. As the transcript of our recorded conversation later confirmed, I alarmed Luckey’s press handler by becoming fixated on this toilet, repeatedly telling him that it was “awesome,” “so fucking awesome,” and “probably the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.” Luckey rescued me from this preoccupation by capering up to the second floor of his lair to show me the dance studio, the sewing room, and the traditional Japanese-style apartment he built for Nicole, who as it happened gave birth to their first child the very next day.

It took me several hours of trailing Luckey—hours filled with air and sea drones, autonomous air vehicles, surveillance and electronic warfare systems currently deployed in Ukraine, a 1966 Mark V Disney Autopia, a 1,600-pound, 670-horsepower, augmented reality headset-operated Autozam AZ-1, which is wrapped in an anime decal of the character LLENN (“In the real world she is very, very tall and nobody thinks she’s cute,” he explained, “so she spends all her time in virtual reality where she can play as a very cute small girl, because that’s what she in her heart wants to be”)—to understand that my monomania for the exposed toilet was just the normal person’s relief at the sight of something ordinary in the fulminating life-world of Palmer Luckey. Aside from having a family and liking Taco Bell, toilet-use might be the only other thing we have in common.

But if he is perhaps the wildest misfit tech diva of his generation, with a torrid ambition and engineering prowess rivaled only by Elon Musk, Luckey is also, in a way Musk is not and cannot be, the product of something more familiar—the heir to a 100-year revolution in American society that made Southern California the techno-theological citadel of the Cold War, and a one-man bridge between the smoldering American past and an unknown future that may be arriving soon. (...)

The shadow of the Sun Belt—which pooled its wealth and voting power into free market and family politics, an eccentric and paranoid anticommunism, pro-Zionism, and a younger, more colorblind hyperpatriotic nationalism—can be hard to spot in the more recent California of Kamala Harris and George Clooney, and the parched corpse that passes for the region’s GOP. But it can be seen following Palmer Freeman Luckey, who went to church here every Sunday as a boy and grew up near the port, watching the Marine Corps practice helicopter drills and Navy ships conduct exercises right offshore, and spent his weekends building computers and coil guns, modifying video game consoles, raiding junkyards, and cannibalizing DVD burners for their laser diodes, which he used to build etching equipment.

Julie Luckey decided to homeschool her children for an uncomplicated reason: She believed all kids are different, and that no schooling system can devise a personalized education for every individual, who by definition is unique. In her son’s case, at least, the decision was vindicated. “These days they’d probably say I had ADD,” Luckey told me at his home in Newport Beach, sitting at his makeshift Dungeons & Dragons table littered with Sonic condiment packets, beneath the 6,500-gallon coldwater tank filled with local predatory fish he built into his white and teal living room. “I’d say I just had boy disorder. But it was pretty clear that I was going to need some special attention if I was going to not just spin out of control.” When he wasn’t doing his schoolwork, Luckey liked reading Jules Verne, Neal Stephenson, and Anne McCaffrey novels, playing video games, and educating himself on electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, gas and solid-state lasers, and high-voltage power systems.

His mother’s sense of the value of tailoring education to the uniqueness of individuals has an echo in Luckey’s love of anime, which began in early childhood—and which is clear from the room on the first floor of his home ringed with glass shelves supporting hundreds of hand-painted vinyl anime figurines, mostly of buxom girl characters. This animated style adapted from Japanese manga, running at a low frame rate and composed of longer fixed scenes, is very cheap—which is what gives the medium its magic, he explained. “The reason that’s so fundamental is that the extremely low cost of production is what allowed anime to become a huge, huge diversity of different genres, of different ideas. They can say, ’We’re going to do an experiment here. We’re going to make something for the weirdos.’”

by Jeremy Stern, Tablet |  Read more:

Image: Elizabeth Weinberg

Kool & The Gang

[ed. See also: ‘Bumble fumble’: online dating apps struggle as people swear off swiping (Guardian).]

It’s Okay to Bow Out

Just one week ago, we all began our lives in a totally new reality: the President would not seek re-election, which (dear God please) we may hope is the last “most consequential development” of this “most consequential election.” Given the weekend that preceded his announcement (remember the events in Butler, PA? Really? Because I personally feel like they happened minimum six months ago), I would say that 2024 has made a serious move on 1968 and 1974 for the title “Craziest Summer in American Politics.” No more breaking news, please!

Thanks to his decision, it appears that President Biden could be anointed one of the most respected leaders we’ve ever had, called “true patriot” and “American hero” by even those who were relentlessly enumerating his deficits and symptoms as if they were actual doctors and not just people who had played them on TV for a few seasons 30 years ago. I for one think the man has earned it, and though the final days of his long record of public service have come sooner than planned, now no outcome in November can dim his legacy, and in fact, quite the opposite: if the Fates – who, you may remember from Greek mythology, were female – have their way, his leadership will be forever linked with the United States electing its first-ever woman as President.

But in all the discourse about how he passed the torch, how he put the cause ahead of his personal ambition – all reasonable and decent things to do, by the way, and we should all consider the opportunities we get to give put our egos on holiday (if not furlough them indefinitely) – I think we may have missed a finer point. One that might never get you called a paragon of integrity, or credit you with saving the republic. But it might save you.

I get why we’ve made the story about selflessness and heroism: it’s good to equate those things, especially in a country (and internet) filled with stage hogs and attention seekers. We were given a rare opportunity to contemplate a public figure who seemed (at least in this moment) more concerned with the big picture than his own mirror reflection; sometimes I wonder if there even are people left who consider declining the full spotlight or ceding the center square. But I think the other reason we’ve made this the narrative is that it allows us not to have to talk about things we’ve not very good at talking about (or doing): age, and acceptance, and admitting that it’s time to pack it in.

Very few us will make choices in the realm of monumental, history-making sacrifice. Our decisions are of the grade that might affect our households or workplaces but are unlikely to garner the thanks of a grateful nation (though I suppose there’s no reason not to try). But we are called on – by others or just ourselves – to pursue and juggle scores of complicated things (Romance! Parenthood! Home ownership! Second home ownership! Getting ahead at work! Having a fit body! Bouncing back from (fill in the blank)! A nice vacation! Being a good child to elderly parents! Being a good friend! Keeping up with the news, the Joneses and the Kardashians!) in a place that prides itself on being filled builders and strivers, never-quitters and big swingers. Here, taking things off the plate or not going the distance feels kind of unspeakable, which makes bowing out nothing short of revolutionary. For those of us who don’t lead countries or nurture true successors, whose daily challenges are of a more personal than global nature, “passing the torch” is letting go. And even then, for most of us, it’s an anathema. It’s why we appeal, and borrow, and delude ourselves. It’s why we feel inadequate, judged, “less than.”

Think about it: we revere not just millionaires but billionaires in a way that almost no nation on earth does – especially if they are self-made – because they are almost by definition people who win and win and win. We nudge people to pursue “main character energy” as a solution to their problems, and deride supposed “former superstars” Jennifer Lopez and Justin Timberlake for shaky “relevance.” It’s not enough to get to the top; you must stay there – otherwise, what was it all for?

Does this not explain how a certain person in the news is embraced as a folk hero instead of a con man? The fact that he is undeterred by his losses, flame-outs and disasters is clearly seen by his superfans as proof of his doggedness; the fact that he would do anything to best his opponents in business or politics, literally anything to get to power and stay here is clearly read as tenacity, grit. America is a place where the story can be whatever you say it is, where you need not even surrender to the truth.

And what is “the truth”? Amongst many: you might have time, but you don’t have forever. You can’t have “it all.” Something’s gotta give. You’ll probably end up with more decisions than options – with two not perfect — or not even great — things to choose from instead of an endless array of glittering, finely calibrated ones. A lot of times, you are presented with only two doors to walk through when you really want three – and sometimes, it’s just one. Sometimes you should keep going, wait it out, refuse to give up, and sometimes you see that the answer is clearly “no.” Sometimes you get to the end of the road before you’re ready. Sometimes you get to smile because you had it, and sometimes you just smile because you tried.

There’s nothing wrong with being achievement-oriented, or pursuing your dreams. In fact, people with absolutely no ambition are no picnic either. But have you ever noticed how the obsession with “goals” (life goals, couple goals, apartment goals, relationship goals, goals goals) can make people crazy – especially in our culture of relentless exposure to what everyone else is doing and having (and feeling)? Where we’re all constantly showing and telling? “Failure is not an option” sounds good on Day 1, so if on Day 10,000 and it’s still not going your way, know that you are allowed to redefine your vision of “success.” Dreams are great, but not if they make us unsympathetic or blind to who were really are or what we are really capable of. Or just up for. Dreams are important, which is why you’ll make new ones.

by Bonnie Morrison, Is It Okay? |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: Five Bad Motivations With Good Outcomes (The Ruffian).]

via:

[ed. Had a doctor appt. this week.]

There Will Be Blood

Early next year, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service plans to send sharpshooters to the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Their target: barred owls, whom they will lure into range with electronic calls and then kill—the opening salvos of a slaughter that is expected to continue for 30 years and claim 470,000 lives. The reason for the carnage? To protect endangered spotted owls outcompeted by their barred cousins.

The plan has been years in the making, with its latest announcement issued on July 3, a day typically used to bury unpopular news before the Independence Day holiday. Nevertheless it made headlines. Barred owls are no less special for being common, and to kill them for the sake of spotted owls—if it even works, which is by no means assured—is something that few people welcome.

The owl dispute is perhaps the most high-profile such conflict to date, though it’s hardly unique. Conservation in the fragmented, ecologically degraded landscapes of the early 21st century frequently involves killing species considered invasive or overabundant in order to protect other species they displace or consume. In Australia and New Zealand, such programs are already massive and routine; they’re fast becoming more common elsewhere. In the U.S., they include the killing of: tortoise-predating ravens in the desert southwest, mammal-eating boa constrictors in the Florida Everglades, fast-proliferating Asian carp in the upper midwest, salmon-eating sea lions in the Columbia River, and on and on.

With the killing comes controversy. Were those animals merely biological automatons, as conventional science once held, it might not be so objectionable—but scientific research on animal intelligence has buttressed arguments for considering the well-being of individuals as well as species in our moral equations. Yet while some people argue that the killing is unethical, others counter that it’s unfortunate but necessary, the harms outweighed by the good of the species and ecosystems being protected.

It’s a profound, polarizing, and extremely complicated dilemma. In Meet the Neighbors, my recent book on animal personhood and nature, the subject of conservation killing arises but is not central; the topic was so massive that it deserved a book all its own—and that book is Hugh Warwick’s The Cull of the Wild, published earlier this year.

“When we humans have unleashed a new species on an unsuspecting fauna, when we have transformed ecosystems so that previous balances become undone, how do we fix the problem?” Warwick asks. “Should we fix the problem? Should we play god, or should nature be left to take its own course?” An ecologist, conservationist, and animal lover as well as a writer, Warwick talks to dozens of people from all perspectives, encouraging readers to challenge their own biases and find common ground. “We deserve an honest conversation,” he writes, though there are no easy answers. (...)

Some of the best-known examples of conservation culling involve eradicating rats on islands that host seabird colonies. And whatever misgivings I feel, I can see the case for it. The before-and-after is so strikingly different. These enormous colonies are delivering nutrients to the surrounding waters; nearshore ecosystems flourish because of them, and the killing is of a limited duration. It’s feasible to kill all the rats on the island. It’s not going to go on forever.

But sometimes the rationale for protecting species can seem very fuzzy. You write about the killing of grey squirrels to protect red squirrels in western Europe. Nobody’s saying that red squirrels are going to go extinct. They’re being replaced by grey squirrels in part of their range. It seems to me like the killing is a matter of aesthetic preference. It’s not about ecosystem function or whether there will be a forest at all—yet the justification is often portrayed as ironclad. I feel uncomfortable with that.

The main issue we’ve got in the United Kingdom is that we will eventually have the extinction of red squirrels in this country. The issue isn’t direct competition between the two species. Rather, grey squirrels carry the squirrel pox virus to which they’re immune but the red squirrels die horribly.

You can very easily drift into an almost ecofascist narrative that only the natives can be here, which is clearly nonsense. The main thing is that you’ve got one species, which is the interloper, which kills the other species by carrying this virus. And we as a society are making a choice as to whether we want to retain or give up on the native species.

I’m certainly not suggesting that people continue controlling grey squirrels forever. I write about Craig Shuttleworth, who kills grey squirrels on the island of Anglesey but says there’s no point doing what is essentially harvesting, where you go out every year and wait for more grey squirrels to be born and kill those. The only reason he did what he did and killed 7,000 grey squirrels with a truncheon is because it could be done as an act of eradication. Before writing the book, I hadn’t really thought through the difference between “control” and “eradication.” Now I see control as a really dirty word. It just means that something is going to go on and on.

In the various checklists—requirements to meet or before killing is done—I’ve collected in The Cull of the Wild, that is one of the central tenets. If you want to start killing, it has to result in the eradication of that species in that area. Otherwise you end up controlling. It becomes a different sort of thing. That seems to be one of the most important differences that wildlife managers often forget.

As I say that, I realize that what goes on with deer in the U.K. is always going to be control. We’re never going to get rid of all the deer. But in that instance we’re replacing the predators who used to be there. We’re trying to maintain a balance that used to exist and is now out of kilter.

I think people who make the argument for killing are sometimes a bit disingenuous in invoking examples of true eradication on islands to support what are really control programs on mainlands—and that standard of not killing indefinitely is often not met.

You might have a situation where you’re not going to get all the raccoons—or whatever species it may be—off an island, but if you don’t do the work of control during bird breeding season then the birds will stop breeding there, and you’ll have altered that ecosystem enormously.

There is an argument for letting nature take its course. Other species will come along and fill the vacant niches. But that’s a little bit like being at the Louvre and seeing art on fire and going, “Yeah, but we’ll get more art. That’s fine.” And I think there is something to be said for protecting what you’ve got, especially when the reason the fire has started is because we lit it.

But sometimes it seems like the fire, so to speak, isn’t really a fire. For example, in the northeastern U.S. there is a panic about spotted lanternflies. People are encouraged to go out and squash as many flies as they can—which isn’t going to make a difference, and the narrative of lanternflies wreaking havoc on trees is speculative and now looks to be overblown. And in my book I talk about an ecologist who defied conventional wisdom on supposedly invasive feral donkeys and showed that they can actually play vital ecological roles. (...)

You also write about non-native ruddy ducks and native white-headed ducks in western Europe. It’s not like one species is replacing the other. They have very similar ecological niches and are interbreeding. Same thing with spotted owls and barred owls in the western U.S.

This is what the animals are choosing for themselves, right? And the offspring are successful. Killing ruddy ducks really does feel like an aesthetic preference—not in the sense of aesthetic as visual, but in the sense of wanting things a certain way—rather than ecosystem function or what’s objectively good or bad.

We’re moving on to the issue of purity. It gets quite nasty quite quickly. How pure is pure.

Another example is the Scottish wildcat, one of the most endangered feline carnivores in the world. The biggest threat they face is through breeding with feral cats. The result there is you get a hybrid cat. And yes, they’re doing what they do naturally.

If you have enough wildcats, females do not go near domestic premises. They do not go seeking out feral mates. There’s none of that crossover. It’s a choice they’re only making because there’s no other choice. Do we want to have wildcats? I suggest wildcats are a good thing. Not only are they aesthetically very pleasing; they add an element of wild to the countryside. They’re the size of a big tabby cat, but they’ve got attitude, and they’re very different from a domestic or feral cat.

Do we then go to the trouble of trying to protect those? What’s interesting there is how you’re defining what is truly the original character—and thereby is a really sorry tale of conflicts between morphological and the genetic appreciations of these cats. There’s an argument that the genetic type specimen used to measure Scottish wildcats might already have been a hybrid, which would lead to pure-bred wildcats being killed because they didn’t match the hybrid.

That argument is important. And the owls—we’ve created a situation where two owls are together who didn’t used to be. Can we relax into accepting this? I think you just need to be pragmatic about these things. There’s no point fighting against something which is inevitable. You’ve got to be sensible about it. The wildcat situation, I think, is salvageable. Your owls are destined for a mixup, and let’s embrace that. (...)

How can we get to a place where killing is truly a last resort?

The problem, as I said earlier, is that in many instances there’s a real serious time factor. And conservation is so far down the list of social priorities that by the time they’re given the resources to do something, it’s already too late. There’s a temptation to point a finger at those conservationists—but they’re working within a system which is fighting against them the entire time. They’re in a field of study that has so little respect yet is so staggeringly important.

As Patrick Galbraith wrote in a review of my book recently, “We are a brilliant and terrible species who messed it up a long time ago. And that means we have to do things we don’t want to.”

But the cost is never borne by us, right? This is what I keep coming back to. We talk about how we’ve done something terrible and need to take responsibility for it now—but ultimately the cost is being heaped entirely on the poor animals being killed. That just seems wrong.

It does. But if you don’t have any killing at all, you cannot then avoid your responsibility for the death that occurs because you decided not to kill. That’s what it comes down to, time and time again: the potential for life that’s gone because we wouldn’t step up to remove the principal cause for a population’s destruction.

by Brandon Kiem, Nature |  Read more:

Image: LaVonna Moore/Shutterstock
[ed. It's a nuanced argument. But when you start killing predators just to increase the number of moose or caribou or elk or whatever just so sport hunters can harvest more of them, then I suggest you've crossed over the line - the artificial control thing. There's also the concept of fair chase. There are alternative ways to reduce invasive species or to help struggling populations - increased bag limits, seasons, bounties, access, and the like. So, shooting wolves from airplanes and helicopters (an old practice in the 50's and 60's) eventually came to be viewed as barbaric. Not anymore, apparently. And drugging and killing denning bears is just plain evil. What's only lightly touched upon in this article are the interest groups and politics involved. For example, see also: Alaska’s misguided bear control continues; and Alaska’s game management goals for Mulchatna caribou are unrealistic (ADN).]

30 Useful Concepts (Spring 2024)

It’s that time again; a summary of interesting and useful concepts to spur your curiosity. Click the titles for more information.

1. Dopamine Culture

“Every kind of organized distraction tends to become progressively more and more imbecile.” — Aldous Huxley

The delay between desire & gratification is shrinking. Pleasure is increasingly more instant & effortless. Everything is becoming a drug. What will it do to us?

2. False Consensus Effect

“Everyone driving slower than you is an idiot and everyone driving faster than you is a maniac.” — George Carlin

Our model of the world assumes people are like us. We don’t just do whatever we consider normal, we also consider normal whatever we do.

3. Fredkin's Paradox

The more similar two choices seem, the less the decision should matter, yet the harder it is to choose between them. As a result, we often spend the most time on the decisions that matter least.

To avoid being paralyzed by meaningless choices, use decision-making heuristics.

4. Package-Deal Ethics

“If I can predict all of your beliefs from one of your beliefs, you’re not a serious thinker.” — Chris Williamson

Being pro-choice and being pro-gun-control don’t necessarily follow from each other, yet those who believe one usually also believe the other. This is because most people don’t choose beliefs individually but subscribe to “packages” of beliefs offered by a tribe.

5. Ovsiankina Effect (aka Hemingway Effect)

We have an intrinsic need to finish what we’ve started. Exploit this by taking your breaks mid-task; the incompleteness will gnaw at you, increasing your motivation to return to work. (When writing, I end each day mid-sentence because it (...)

11. Noble Cause Corruption

The greatest evils come not from people seeking to do evil, but people seeking to do good and believing the ends justify the means. Everyone who was on the wrong side of history believed they were on the right side.

Grey Rock Method

Reacting emotionally to narcissists and other toxic people only gives them what they want — your time & energy — which encourages further abuse. If you want to stop receiving provocations, stop being provoked. When the narcissist realizes they can’t manipulate your emotions, they’ll stop trying. (...)

14. Postjournalism

The press lost its monopoly on news when the internet democratized info. To save its business model, it pivoted from journalism into tribalism. The new role of the press is not to inform its readers but to confirm what they already believe.

15. Adams’ 25% rule (aka Skill-Stacking)

Instead of trying to be the best at one thing, try to be "merely" great at two things and then learn to combine them. Not only is this easier, but it will make your skillset more unique, cutting out the competition.

16. Backwards Law

The more you pursue happiness, the less likely you are to obtain it, because the focus on acquiring it only reinforces the fact that you don’t have it. Ironically, happiness comes easiest to those who don’t worry about it.

“Happiness is like a butterfly, the more you chase it, the more it will evade you, but if you notice the other things around you, it will gently come and sit on your shoulder.”

― Henry David Thoreau (...)

Hitchens' Razor

“What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”

― Christopher Hitchens

If you make a claim, it's up to you to prove it, not to me to disprove it.

Cached Thoughts

Most of your beliefs were formed earlier in your life, when you were naiver. You continue to believe them only because you’ve never reconsidered them. When you’re about to offer an opinion, consider when you formed it, and ask: is it really your belief, or your younger self’s?

by Gurwinder, The Prism |  Read more: 

Image: uncredited

The Old Gray Kayak

KOTZEBUE — The west wind off the ice has kept the bugs down, and on the sunny summer nights I’ve been working on a kayak for my daughter, China. Actually, I’m copying one my dad built back in the 1970s, a light hunting craft that I used all my life.

These days I have cordless power tools — drills, screw guns and a jigsaw — items that would have been magic in my youth, when I was woodworking with hand saws, chisels and a brace-and-bit. (Not to mention first snowshoeing out to find a tree, then hauling it home to make boards.) I’ve been surprised, though, piecing a kayak together here on a blue tarp, how impatient I am. I miss not being busy, and immersing myself in a project. Once in a while I stop and marvel at these modern riches — even this blue disposable tarp.

This winter when China and I snowgoed downriver from our home along the Kobuk, I lashed that old kayak on my sled. It had hung under the cache for decades, and suffered, and snow finally buckled it. Over the years porcupine had crawled inside to gnaw the frames, and bears strolling by had fondled it. The ancient spruce stringers cracked more as I tightened the ropes. I felt bad hearing that breaking wood. Our sleds and kayaks were so vital and valuable when I was a kid, back a half-century and more, when this craft was made.

Standing there on the snow, I recalled the spring that Oliver Cameron camped at Amaktuk, a slough near our sod igloo, and how he’d walk down the bluff to help my dad build his first kayak. Those were simpler times. It was easier to recognize the value of things, and a kayak meant you could hunt the tundra after breakup, after the water dropped. Oliver was known for knowing things and he recommended skinning it with canvas, painting the cloth, then waxing it. He was living under a homemade canvas tent, with little besides a cooking pot and hand tools. Oliver enjoyed making tools, and I can still hear him filing teeth out of my dad’s ripsaw to make bigger teeth so it would cut faster.

China Kantner and her dad head west on the winter trail to Kotzebue. (Seth Kantner)

My dad, Howie, worked on the snowdrift in front of our house, ripping spruce stringers on crude spruce-pole sawhorses. Geese flew overhead, calling, and caribou crossed the melting river ice. Day and night they climbed out on the drift, shook off, and headed north.

After sawing, Howie planed the wood. He was always sawing and planing: in winter, it was hardwood for sleds; spring and fall it was boards for our floor, furniture, and later, boats. The air smelled like wood and my family always had beautiful shavings for firestarter.

The kayak came out tippy and my older brother, Kole, and I weren’t allowed to use it. Too dangerous. Howie made more kayaks the following springs: one big enough for our family to fit in; one blue (I’d forgotten all about it!) wide and safe and slow. The last two were a green deckless craft, and this gray one, my favorite.

We boys were 5 and 6 when my parents’ friend, Keith Jones, built a log raft. He’d cut the trees for Charlie Jones on the coast, and after breakup we rafted down the Kobuk. Onboard were six adults and two boys. It was a grand adventure: sun and wind and rain, animals crossing, fish jumping, ducks skimming past, and of course, mosquitoes biting. Birds sang all night and occasionally a bear walked the shore. There was a Black man along, Marty, who I haven’t thought of in years. I wonder who he was? And Keith’s brother-in-law, Don Bucknell, too; young, probably 21 and already liking to carve paddles and spoons out of spruce roots. One day he dropped his pocketknife between the logs. Plunk. Gone. I never forgot that. I wonder where that knife is now.

Nights we camped, and days Kole and I paddled out, circling the raft. We didn’t know how to swim, but as long as we wore our life preservers, we were allowed to practice turns, race and cautiously approach loons that randomly surfaced.

A few years later, Howie and Keith taught us to portage — carrying kayaks, guns, ducks, eggs and muskrats, from pond to pond — hunting through the night, exploring waterways in tundra. This gray kayak was the best. Howie had made it light and low. Even the ribs were just split peeled dried willows.

The funny thing is, even now, broken in pieces, it’s not easy dismantling his workmanship. The glue and screws are holding fast, the twine lashing each rib is still tight. I’m reminded of how spoiled I am, running stringers through a table saw, filling poor joinery with adhesive, sanding it down with an electric sander. Working, I think about China’s life in the future, and about life further back, too; ancient stone tools, in the hands of Inupiaq, making the first qayaqs.

When I was a kid, one night on a pond I flipped in the gray kayak. Kole and I and our friend Alvin Williams were hunting with .22s and one shotgun. Alvin had amazing eyesight and spotted two shovelers. I couldn’t see the ducks, only the lines on the water. “Male in front!” he advised. I knew to shoot the female first. Boom! Instantly I was in icy water.

I gasped for air, splashed, and tried to grab Alvin’s kayak. We were best friends and he grinned and used his paddle to force me away. I had to lean across the stern of my kayak, and kick around ice pans, toward shore. It was slow going until Kole pulled in the strings tied to my trigger guards, to retrieve my guns dragging on the bottom. Alvin built a fire and Kole plucked the duck while they retold the story over and over, struggling with bouts of laughter. I thawed out and the duck sizzled. When I was shivering less and the bird was half done, we ate it, and continued on in the night.

My family built a new sod house when I was 16. We moved up the hill and our kayaks went in the old igloo. More years went by. My wife, Stacey, and I kayaked from Ambler once, and below Onion Portage the wind was strong, the waves huge, and she was afraid in that tiny gray kayak. We camped, and waited for the wind to go down. When we got home, I stapled material over the bow and stern. It didn’t help much: the following spring, one night I talked two friends, Dave Fleming and Chris Todd, into going portaging, and back in the ponds Dave fired the shotgun and flipped. Pretty much as I had. Except I don’t remember him hitting the duck. We built a fire. We laughed, but less than we had as kids, and it was cold and late and we had women wondering about us, and we went home.

Later, living there alone, one fall at freeze-up the river was running ice and I crossed after a wounded goose. I was maybe 28, and this kayak a bit younger. I got the goose but was swept under the ice on the way back and nearly drowned. When I crawled out and dumped all the broken ice out of the kayak, I couldn’t believe the old stringers and vinyl covering were intact.

Over the years, the old igloo fell in. Snow drifted in and crushed two kayaks. Vandals stole my shotgun and shot holes in a third. The gray one survived and hung under the cache after that. Then we had a daughter, and she loved kayaking. She was light and the cracked ribs held. Bears still beat on it and the bottom grew pocked with patches of duct tape.

One fall I was supposed to fly to the dunes to meet BBC photographers to film caribou; the plane was delayed, and my friend Linnea Wik and I decided to kayak downriver to meet the pilot. I had my camera and gear — too heavy — and only survey stakes for paddles. The kayak creaked horribly. Water squirted in and it was hard to steer. We stayed close to the shore, stopped to dump it out, and laughed the whole way.

I thought that was that, but my daughter kept using it. I built her a new one, and still she preferred the old one. A black bear came up the shore one morning and took swipes at it. We needed meat, and she shot the bear. After we were done skinning, we got out the duct tape again.

Finally, the fall of 2020, there were no caribou, the land felt different and the old kayak really was compost. The willow ribs were white, the spruce as gray as the cover. Then, I spotted a lone caribou on the tundra. The north wind was howling, the sky brilliant blue. My friend Anne Beaulaurier was visiting, and I gave her the new kayak, took the old one. Wood cracked as I got in. My butt was instantly wet. My dad’s old portage trails were brushed in. At the Beaver Pond grasses had grown a floating swamp. Anne had Patagonia waders, I just rubber boots. I stared across dark waves, longing for caribou. I took off my pants, pushed my boat in. The water and grasses grew deep, over my waist. I couldn’t turn. My rifle stock was wet. I leaned up on the stern, tugging at grasses, inching forward. When I got to open water, I was frozen and the waves scary. At the north shore, the tundra was empty, the caribou gone. I wonder where he is now?

Working out here tonight, the wind and those memories swirl around me. I wonder where China will travel in this kayak. It feels strange, how much has changed. I’ve listened to podcasts — about Palestine, AI, guns and modern youth — while I make ribs of beautiful birch from a friend in Fairbanks, John Manthei. The electronic voices are full of information, but also seem to bury information in my head. For years I’ve thought that sleds and kayaks are good examples of changing values, and questioned how a young person might value a manufactured piece of plastic as much as one started from a tree, and finished by their own hands.

by Seth Kantner, Anchorage Daily News |  Read more:

Image: Anne Beaulaurier; Seth Kantner
[ed. Back in AK again. No place like it.]

Image: markk

Chi Chi Rodriguez (Oct. 1935 - Aug. 2024)

Images: via Tik Tok, Golf Digest, Devo

[ed. Entertaining and fun guy. And great golfer! My dad once found himself standing next to Chi Chi at a clubhouse urinal on a course in Hawaii. Just the two of them. He said hi and they exchanged a couple of pleasantries. He later told me he hoped he wouldn't see Chi Chi's famous sword dance when they got finished... lol. See also: World Golf Hall of Famer Chi Chi Rodriguez dies at 88; and, My Shot: Chi Chi Rodriguez (Golf Digest). His Wikipedia entry (with many additional details).]

diadà

via:

Ok, I'm the Problem

via:

[ed. People wonder why dating is so hard these days. Points for honesty.]

via:

Campaign Calculus

[ed. What passes as political strategy these days.]

Donald Trump’s campaign recognizes that it could lose in November if the election is decided on “vibes” and “energy”, according to people close to the former president, as Kamala Harris continues to ride waves of momentum with her newly announced running mate Tim Walz.

The concern has also started to open fractures inside Trumpworld, with some Maga allies criticizing Trump’s political advisers for running a campaign that may be too structurally deficient to stand up a ground game in swing states.

The Trump campaign has sketched out a strategy to hit back and is expected to try to cast the Harris campaign the most progressive US ticket of all time, as they aim to get the political messaging back on their records in office and away from coverage about the extraordinary enthusiasm Harris has generated with voters.

The Trump campaign intends to continue trying to make Harris responsible in the eyes of voters for the influx of migrants, and her role as the “border czar” allowing migrants to spread across the country in part to alleviate pressure on border states.

That ties into their other strategy of pulling a “Willie Horton” attack from the old Republican playbook, suggesting on social media and in television ads that Harris was directly responsible for any crimes some migrants committed. Horton – a convicted murderer who committed more crimes while on prison furlough – was used in a racist attack strategy by George Bush during his 1988 presidential campaign.

With Walz, the strategy for now has been to say he ushered in progressive policies as Minnesota governor, focusing on how he supported transgender medical care for children, approved sweeping climate change legislation and enshrined abortion rights into law.

The campaign has also been eager to cast Walz as falsifying his military record – he has alluded vaguely to serving in Iraq although he left the military before his unit was deployed – an attack style that Trump’s current co-campaign chief Chris LaCivita once used against the decorated Vietnam veteran John Kerry in the “Swift Boat” episode.

The effort to focus on Harris and Walz’s governing records provide a window on to the Trump campaign knowing it needs to avoid a vibes-based election at all costs, the people said. The Trump campaign knows running on national mood will not work against Harris’s stunning momentum since she entered the race in the way it did with Biden.

For weeks before Biden ultimately withdrew, the principal fear inside Trump world was that Biden dropping out would give a successor massive momentum. And it was for that reason that Trump himself refrained from piling on Biden, even as top Democrats pressured him to quit the race.

The momentum premonition has turned out to be true and highly problematic for the Trump campaign as they struggle to get into the news cycle. It is the first time that Trump has largely lost control of the media narrative – and with it, his ability to trash the Harris ticket – since he was indicted in 2023.

But it remains unclear whether the Trump attack lines will work, at least over the next few weeks with seemingly no end in sight for Harris’s extended honeymoon period – an important factor because the longer the honeymoon period lasts, the less time Trump has to negatively define Harris. (...)

On top of that, the attacks themselves have been less tailored than what they were with Biden and, in many ways, easily rebuttable by the Harris team.

If challenged on migrant crime, for instance, Harris is expected to pivot to saying she is an ex-prosecutor running against a convicted felon, bringing unwanted attention to Trump’s recent conviction in New York for falsifying business records to influence the 2016 election.

And if challenged on the Iraq situation, Walz could make a more painful point about Trump not serving in Vietnam on account of his bone spurs.

More broadly speaking, the other attack lines from Trump against Harris have not appeared to have the same effect as his lines had done with Biden. Trump spent some time testing out the “Cacklin’ Kamala” nickname to show her as unserious on account of her laugh, but he recently started trying “Kamabla” – a sign he was not sold on his initial option though it is not clear what the insult means.

by Hugo Lowell, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

[ed. Completely juvenile.]

Terrified of Old People

I'm terrified of old people. 

I used to be extremely confident in myself. 

I was barely 20 years old and I would tell people how to sleep, how to make friends, and how to live their lives. I started a nonprofit aiming to literally rebuild the institutions of science from the ground up. I was dismissive of everyone who didn't impress me in the first 7 minutes of talking to them. I was especially dismissive of old people. 

I'm 26 years old now, I (hope that I) got a tiny bit wiser but I'm pretty sure I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm embarrassed for having published all of these articles giving people advice on how to live their lives; I'm amazed that the nonprofit actually managed to run great programs and fund dozens of young scientists; and I'm absolutely terrified of old people. 

I've always wanted to prove myself to the world; if I were a 60 year old, trying to impress a random 25 year old would be the last thing I'd be trying to do. First, wanting to impress people is the result of not knowing what you want and by the time you're 50 or 60 or 70 you do know what you want [ed. more likely what you'll get or settle for. And people definitely do try to impress for things they know they want.]. Second, the stupider people think I am, the better. I just want to do my thing and I don't want anyone to think highly of me and start actively interfering with whatever it is that I'm doing. [ed. and that is? If it's trying to convince people of something, do you really want them to think not very highly of you and that you're stupid? Really?]

I've always thought that I was very competent. Now I at least realize that I have no fucking clue how anything works. 

Which makes me think: I have like 5 years of experience of real life. What kind of tricks under their belts do people in their 50s, 60s, 70s have? What kinds of crazy heuristics and meta-heuristics they've got in their minds, hearts, and muscles after decades of poking the world? I have no clue and this is what makes me really worried about them. [ed. worried about them? Over crazy heuristics and meta-hueristics?]

I wouldn't be surprised if these decades-in-the-making lessons are so qualitatively different from whatever I believe now that even if someone tried to tell them to me I simply wouldn't be able to comprehend them. [ed. oh, well...maybe try? Isn't that what growing up is all about?]

I also suspect that the declining intelligence measurements of old people are mostly attributable to slower-lookup and "shallow" reactions rather than any actual decline in quality of decision-making. [ed. what? ... lost my hearing aid and need to read that again.]

There's exactly one person who I suspect might be running the simulation and he's not 30 or even 40. He's in his 70s. [ed. Bill Gates?]

People ask me why I don't publish much these days. How about because I have a bunch of stupid shit on my blog that's going to follow me into the grave now and because now whenever I talk to someone they usually "remember" me writing something even dumber than what I actually wrote ("oh, Alexey, weren't you the guy who thought that sleeping 4 hours a night is totally fine?" "No, I wrote that sleeping 4 hours a night didn't make me dumb AND that it was absolutely terrible, please stop asking me about this")? 

I think about Sam Altman's "honestly, i feel so bad about the advice i gave while running YC i’ve been thinking about deleting my entire blog" a lot. 

I do think the majority of my pieces stood the test of time and I'm very proud of them (for example "Every productivity thought I've ever had, as concisely as possible" which is nearing its 6th anniversary), so maybe I'm overreacting. But it's still unnerving. [ed. but, but...what about all that 'stupid shit' and the grave?]

(Ok, back to old people.) 

Many things just take time. 

Having 0 close friends is qualitatively different from having 1 close friend from having 5 close friends. Just as knowing them for 1 year versus 5 years versus 25 years. So much stuff in the world can only be achieved via close long-term connections. Probably most of the important stuff. Again, the only way to get these connections is to literally just wait. No other way. [ed. what? How about seeking them out?]

My biggest problem running the company, for example, was simply not knowing enough people to be able to hire for the roles the organization needed the most and instead burning through many months and enormous amounts of nerves figuring out if people I just met were (1) right for the role, (2) work well with me, (3) I work well with them. If I'm starting a company today, I'm simply not doing it until I have an incredible operations person on board from day 1. [ed. so again, off-loading management and learning experience to someone else (to determine if they're compatible with you and vice versa?)].

I understand why you need to be at least 35 years old to become President. [ed. ha!]

Patrick Mackenzie once noted that "people consistently overestimate how widely distributed individual technologies are, even where those technologies are clearly better than alternatives, easy to implement, and have minimal downside risk or cost to reverse adoption." [ed. uh, what were we talking about again? According to who? Corporations, hedge funds and shareholders? How about when those technologies are actually worse than previous efforts and come with significant side effects like more invasive surveillance, DRM, right-to-repair impediments, awful interfaces, subscription requirements, etc.]  

How come? Again — things just take time. A huge portion of life is simply about building years-long and decades-long muscle memories for "simple" technologies. To stop the brain when it gets into over-analyzing spirals. To error-correct appropriately when things go wrong. To ask for help. [ed. again... what? And this relates to everything previously written how?]

No amount of reading insights or writing will get you to truly learn this stuff. In fact most of it sounds like empty platitudes & the more you read and write the less time you have to apply it with your body and with your muscles. If I told this to my 16-year old self, he'd tell me to go fuck myself. [ed. bright kid.]

And, sure, no 80-year old is going to be as idealistic or energetic or attractive as when they were 20. 

But if you ask me if I'd rather have a President who is 20 or who is 80, I'll pick the 80-year old in a heartbeat. [ed. many Americans wouldn't.]

by Alexey Guzey, X  |  Read more:

Image: A. Guzey X

[ed. Never heard of this person except through a link today. Some kind of 'independent researcher'/tech pundit...or something or other. Poor guy. Still doesn't get it. Just shut up and get off of X! Nobody cares! (But he's 26 now and not a naive 20). Here's a clue: nobody gives a damn what you think. It's what you do that matters, and apparently that's been very little except to offer some pithy opinions that very few people have heard of or read. Life presents different challenges at different times, and people can be just as confused and opinionated at any age. So broad generalizations do no one any good. Go out and live life and get some real experience, then come back and tell us what you think. I'll bet it'll be very different from this.]

At Least Five Interesting Things For Your Weekend

[ed. As a followup to Ezra Klein's excellent interview with Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii (Democrats Need a Better Answer on Affordability. Here's One), which echos many of these themes.]

1. Intel’s troubles and American short-termism

Intel stock took a huge nosedive today, losing over a quarter of its value. That’s only top of a big long-term decline since 2021. The company is worth less than a third of what it was at its peak in 2021:

The trigger for today’s decline was Intel’s announcement that it was going to going to cut 15% of its workforce and suspend dividend payments to shareholders. The longer-term drop is related to Intel’s falling revenue, which has plummeted since 2021:

Source: Bloomberg

The long-term story of Intel’s woes is by now well-known. The company grew fat and complacent from relying on its old line of business — supplying ever-better CPUs to server farms — and kept missing new markets and new business models as a result. TSMC’s foundry business proved more efficient than Intel at pushing the boundaries of chip manufacturing — using EUV lithography tools that Intel itself paid to invent, and then ended up not using. NVidia became the master of designing GPUs for AI, while a bunch of other companies like ARM and Samsung mastered low-power smartphone processors. Intel suffered from a classic case of Clay Christensen-style disruption.

On top of that, several short term factors are weighing on Intel. The post-pandemic chip shortage turned into a glut, slamming Intel’s sales and profits. U.S. export controls on China cut off Intel’s sales to Huawei.

Some commentators, seeing Intel’s woes, are rushing to declare this a failure of industrial policy. For example, here’s the WSJ editorial board:

In other bad industrial policy news, Bloomberg reported this week that Intel is planning to cut thousands of additional jobs. This would be the chip maker’s third large workforce reduction since Congress passed the $280 billion chips subsidy bill that CEO Patrick Gelsinger lobbied for. Intel has been awarded $8.5 billion in grants and up to $11 billion in loans to expand U.S. manufacturing production.

While chasing subsidies, Intel missed out on the AI boom, which has cost it dearly as competitors surge ahead. Now it’s playing catch-up. When government steers capital, companies sometimes get distracted and drive into a cul-de-sac.

At the New York Post, Stephen Moore and Phil Kerpen declare that “Biden-Harris wasted $8.5 billion in taxpayer money to lose 15,000 jobs at Intel”.

Now, spending on Intel might indeed turn out to be a waste — someday. But it’s pretty ludicrous to say that Intel’s cost-cutting moves and stock price drops reflect the failure of CHIPS Act subsidies. The $8.5 billion in subsidies to Intel were announced in March 2024, in a non-binding preliminary memorandum. It is now August 2024, less than five months after that announcement. That means it’s very possible that zero dollars have actually been disbursed to Intel so far. Certainly, the majority of the subsidy money remains unspent.

It’s a little bit silly to criticize the results of a policy that hasn’t even been implemented yet.

Meanwhile, Intel’s turnaround plans — including a foundry business like TSMC’s and investments in AI chips — are still in the early stages. One reason profits have fallen at Intel is that it’s investing heavily. Bloomberg reports:

The company reports revenues divided between product groups and its manufacturing operations, with factories undergoing a massive upgrade and a build-out program that’s weighing heavily on profits…Revenue is improving at what [Intel] calls its Foundry unit, gaining 4% from a year earlier to $4.32 billion.

Furthermore, Intel’s suspension of a dividend signals that it’s planning to invest its earnings in its own business, rather than returning cash to shareholders. Paying dividends is what companies do when they don’t have ways to profitably reinvest the money; this is why growth stocks don’t tend to pay dividends. This is just Corporate Finance 101.

And Intel’s job cuts, painful as they are for the workers affected, are a cost-cutting move that will free up more cash to invest in the company’s recovery plan. Whether that plan will succeed isn’t clear yet, but if you were going to turn a company like Intel around, this is probably how you’d start.

Steve Glinert (a previous Noahpinion guest contributor) has a good thread where he acknowledges Intel’s missteps and challenges, but expresses frustration with the short-termism implicit in the current round of doomsaying:

The rush to declare Intel’s struggles a failure of industrial policy is emblematic of the crippling short-termist mindset that America has allowed to set over the past few decades. It’s the same brain worm that led the same people to declare Obama’s cleantech loan programs a failure because of Solyndra, when those same loan programs boosted Tesla to become the world leader in electric vehicles — with a market cap worth far more than every penny the U.S. government spent on the entire loan program.

Industrial policy takes time. If you think that just announcing some subsidies, without even writing the checks, should be enough to boost a company like Intel to world domination within five months, you’re living in a fantasy land of your own creation. I don’t know whether or not Intel will turn itself around, but if the doomsaying of the WSJ’s editorial board represents all the patience America can muster, we might as well resign ourselves to living in the Chinese Century.

2. What’s wrong with Canada’s economy?

Canada has turned in a disappointing economic performance over the last decade, coming in behind most other rich countries — even slow-growing ones like the UK and Japan:

Canada’s productivity levels were close to those of the U.S. in 1980, but have fallen far behind since then:

Source: RBC Economics

This poor performance is a bit of a mystery. Canada is located right next to the fast-growing U.S. It has avoided a financial crisis or other economic calamity. It has arguably the world’s best immigration policy, with a massive continuous influx of high-skilled immigrants. So what’s wrong?

RBC Economics has come out with the first plausible-sounding answer I’ve seen. In a recent article, they argue that Canada’s problem is a combination of low levels of investment and slow productivity growth, caused by regulatory red tape, a lack of R&D, and a pivot from manufacturing and technology to lower-productivity-growth industries like construction and services:

Some of the causes of Canada’s long-term slowdown in economic growth are well-known and clear. Let‘s start with an inefficient regulatory and administrative approval system at all levels of government, which has unintentionally increased internal barriers to trade and growth. Infrastructure chokepoints and red tape further make international trade more difficult than it should be. Those have contributed to lower Canadian business investment, and with that, an overweight of capital going to buildings and construction…

Canadian businesses invest substantially less than in the U.S.—about half as much per worker in aggregate…[P]art of the slowing in investment has been from a pullback in investment in the Canadian oil and gas sector…But, businesses have also invested a substantially smaller share of GDP in the manufacturing sector in Canada than in the U.S. over the last decade…

Businesses have long argued that an inefficient project approvals backdrop is making investing in Canada relatively expensive…

A patchwork of regulatory and administrative rules across different municipalities and provinces is complicated and unintentionally restricts trade within Canada…The International Monetary Fund has estimated that internal trade barriers (for example, regulatory differences across regions, paperwork requirements for businesses in multiple jurisdictions, and certification differences that limit labour mobility) cost the equivalent of a 20% average tariff between provinces…

[T]here remain significant bottlenecks where Canadian infrastructure significantly underperforms. The country’s turnaround times at ports are among the longest in the world…Canada also ranks poorly on “ease of exporting” in global rankings by the World Bank largely due to high document and paperwork costs…

Productivity in Canada lags in most industries versus the U.S., but the Canadian economy is also overweight in construction, where productivity growth has been slower. (...)

As for policy recommendations, there’s some easy libertarian stuff here — slash land-use regulation and red tape at ports, harmonize provincial regulation to enable internal trade, and cut corporate taxes. That’s the low-hanging fruit.

But that doesn’t seem like it’ll be enough to do the trick, because the sectoral shift from tech and manufacturing to construction and services will still be a problem. Canada needs to think about dipping its toes into the waters of industrial policy. Exactly what that could look like is a topic for a longer post.

3. If you want good cheap infrastructure, build up state capacity

America has a big problem building infrastructure. Our roads and trains cost much more per mile than other rich countries. There are a number of reasons why this is the case, including land-use regulation, NIMBYism, and broken government contracting processes. But one reason is simply that the U.S. lacks state capacity. We used to have a bunch of highly competent government bureaucrats who knew how to get roads and trains built; then, starting in the 1970s, we fired a bunch of those workers and let much of the in-house expertise decay into nothingness. In its place we hired a bunch of expensive outside consultants whose goal was maximizing their own payouts from the government, rather than providing high-quality infrastructure for the citizenry at a reasonable cost to the taxpayer.

This has been one conclusion of the Transit Costs Project, a panel of experts that has devoted years to studying the problem of rail costs in the U.S. In a recent report on how America could actually build high-speed rail, they reiterate the importance of in-house expertise vs. outside consultants:

With a bank of rail experts in Washington and universities churning out grads with relevant skills, individual projects could reduce their reliance on consultants and do more work in-house. (This was also a recommendation of a previous Transit Costs Project study about local mass transit.) To take a related example, for the price of one consultant contract to study whether to put trash in garbage bins or not, you could hire 10 in-house experts for four years to create a culture of trash expertise at the heart of local government.

But this isn’t just speculative. BART, the Bay Area’s commuter rail service, has been replacing its rolling stock (that’s a fancy name for train cars), which it calls the Fleet of the Future project. It has been accomplishing this within a reasonable time frame — not as fast as Japan would, but much faster than we’ve come to expect from California infrastructure projects. And unlike most other California infrastructure projects, Fleet of the Future has come in way under budget!

In a recent update, BART explains the secrets of their success:

BART’s popular Fleet of the Future project has just completed one milestone, with the final car of the original contract now ready for service…In the six years since the first Fleet of the Future train first went into service, the new trains have gone from a surprising sight for riders to an everyday part of their trip….

The increased pace in production and delivery of the new fleet has been essential to the transition. Car manufacturer Alstom is now delivering 20 cars a month to BART, almost twice as many as the 11 cars a month stipulated in the original delivery schedule…

The quicker tempo of deliveries is one of the reasons the Fleet of the Future project is expected to come $394 million under budget. Another big cost saver was BART’s decision to have its own highly experienced staff do more of the engineering work in house. The project team, led by John Garnham, has included engineers who have successfully completed new rail car projects at other agencies. (emphasis mine)

State capacity, folks. It really works. America needs more and better bureaucrats for things like infrastructure, because the alternative is to throw huge amounts of taxpayer money at inefficient outside contractors. 

4. Why East Asian countries got rich

For well over half a century, economists have been having a wonky but very fascinating debate about how poor countries get rich. The question is how important capital investment is, relative to improvements in technology, education, regulatory policy, industrial structure, trade, urbanization, and other things that get summarized under the name of total factor productivity or multifactor productivity. The answer is important, because the more important capital investment is, the more poor countries can catch up simply by pouring more money into building factories, infrastructure, housing, and offices. Whereas the more important TFP is, the more countries need to focus on making difficult institutional and structural changes in order to keep growing.

Thirty years ago, Paul Krugman wrote an article called “The Myth of Asia’s Miracle”, in which he argued — based on the work of Alwyn Young — that most East Asian countries (with the exception of Japan) had grown fast not because of TFP, but because of high levels of capital investment. Klenow and Rodriguez-Clare (1997) disagreed, arguing that TFP growth stimulates more capital investment, so that we should attribute more of the East Asian growth miracle to TFP than Krugman and Young do. (...)

So basically, China transitioned from TFP-based growth to investment-based growth after the Great Recession. That’s a highly simplified story, but that’s our best guess as to what happened.

The question now is whether China can transition back. The optimistic view — from China’s perspective, anyway — is that the real estate bust will shift resources back to manufacturing, and that Xi Jinping’s massive and unprecedented industrial policy will give a big boost to TFP growth. The pessimistic view is that the shift from TFP-growth growth to investment-based growth in 2008 reflects the inherent limitations of China’s state-driven model, and that it will fall short of countries like Japan and South Korea in terms of living standards. Basically, the question is whether Xi Jinping’s China is more like a newer, bigger South Korea, or more like a newer, bigger Soviet Union.

5. Hanania on race in the 2020s

Richard Hanania is a pundit whose work I generally do not like. His typical analysis relies heavily on racial and gender stereotypes, and he gets a lot of stuff wrong. But ever since a major expose thrust him into the limelight last year, Hanania’s takes have at least, occasionally been more measured and reasonable. And I must give credit where credit is due here, because I think that he had a very good take on the recent “White Women for Kamala” and “White Dudes for Harris” events.

Basically, Hanania argues that after a decade of singling White people out for collective castigation, the progressive movement is accepting White people as just another racial interest group worthy of inclusion in the coalition:

One thing right-wingers love is to complain that you can only have affinity groups for blacks and other minorities…Along comes the Kamala campaign and says it’s ok to be white. That is, as long as you’re a good person, which means supporting reproductive freedom, not being “weird,” and voting Democrat. We’re all in this together.

It seems “woke” on the surface, but it’s actually a sign that liberals are moving away from woke. In 2020, something like this wouldn’t have even been possible. Talk of “whites” in left-coded spaces only occurred in the context of flogging them for their sins. In 2024, you can be a white dude for Kamala and it’s totally cool. The symbol for “White Dudes for Harris” is a trucker hat, showing self-deprecating humor and membership in a movement that is not at all weird or neurotic about race.

White people receive the message that Democrats do not consider you the problem. You’re welcome into the coalition. There’s even a Zoom call you can join, and don’t worry, it won’t be just Robin DiAngelo telling you how much you suck. Kamala has made clear that she’s *only* considering white men for VP…

Republicans have been caught flat-footed. Conservatives want to portray these events as a kind of 2020 DEI struggle session, and they can find clips backing up that view, but people who have attended say that there was actually very little of that…

What else can conservatives say in response? I’ve seen a little bit of “why can’t we have a whites for Trump thing?” Well, who’s stopping you? It’s a free country. Organize “whites for Trump” and see what happens…There will be no “Whites for Trump” event because the campaign would never allow it, understanding it would be a PR nightmare. “Whites for Trump” would draw sewer dwellers, instead of the nice, seemingly normal people that came out for Harris…

We can now all see the hopelessness and stupidity of white nationalism, which wants to argue that the 220 million American whites who are at each other’s throats over social issues and values should unite under one umbrella because they share the same interests. The only way white identitarianism would have had any hope is if liberalism stayed in summer of Floyd mode indefinitely, where you push anti-white rhetoric so blatantly and aggressively that it causes a natural reaction.

Whites for Kamala completely defuses any hope of building a broad white identitarian coalition.

This sounds basically right to me. White people are not yet a numerical minority in America — and depending on how many Hispanic and multiracial Americans define themselves as White, they may never be. But events like “White women for Kamala” show that the progressive movement may simply decide to treat White progressives as just one more minority identity group in a rainbow coalition.

And I think Hanania is also right that if this happens, it will take a lot of the wind out of the sails of white nationalism and rightism in general. For most people, being part of a minority group in a rainbow coalition probably sounds like a better deal than fighting a grim race war to try to expel other groups en masse or break up the nation just to be a supermajority again.

But at the same time, I think there’s another vision that’s even better than the rainbow coalition. If national identity can be strengthened, and the salience of racial identities weakened, Americans wouldn’t have to define their place in American society by the circumstances of their birth. The proper counter to progressive identitarianism will never be White nationalism; it will always be American nationalism.

Update: I also like Hanania’s take on progressives re-embracing patriotism and the American flag. I don’t think it’s quite true yet, but I think it’s what should happen, and maybe by the end of this decade it will.

6. San Francisco nonprofits are both corrupt and ineffectual

In 2022, there was a big tech bust that deprived the city of San Francisco, and the state of California in general, of a lot of tax revenue. At that point, San Francisco began taking a harder look at the nonprofits to which it has famously outsourced many of its social services. Unsurprisingly, many cases of incompetence and outright corruption are being discovered. (...)

by Noah Smith, Noahpinion |  Read more:

Images: Bloomberg; Slejven Djurakovic on Unsplash

He Who Shrank

Years, centuries, aeons, have fled past me in endless parade, leaving me unscathed: for I am deathless, and in all the universe alone of my kind. Universe? Strange how that convenient word leaps instantly to my mind from force of old habit. Universe? The merest expression of a puny idea in the minds of those who cannot possibly conceive whereof they speak. The word is a mockery. Yet how glibly men utter it! How little do they realize the artificiality of the word!
That night when the Professor called me to him he was standing close to the curved transparent wall of the astrono-laboratory looking out into the blackness. He heard me enter, but did not look around as he spoke. I do not know whether he was addressing me or not.

"They call me the greatest scientist the world has had in all time."

I had been his only assistant for years, and was accustomed to his moods, so I did not speak. Neither did he for several moments and then he continued:

"Only a half year ago I discovered a principle that will be the means of utterly annihilating every kind of disease germ. And only recently I turned over to others the principles of a new toxin which stimulates the worn-out protoplasmic life-cells, causing almost complete rejuvenation. The combined results should nearly double the ordinary life span. Yet these two things are only incidental in the long list of discoveries I have made to the great benefit of the race."

He turned then and faced me, and I was surprised at a new peculiar glow that lurked deep in his eyes.

"And for these things they call me great! For these puny discoveries they heap honors on me and call me the benefactor of the race. They disgust me, the fools! Do they think I did it for them? Do they think I care about the race, what it does or what happens to it or how long it lives? They do not suspect that all the things I have given them were but accidental discoveries on my part -- to which I gave hardly a thought. Oh, you seem amazed. Yet not even you, who have assisted me here for ten years, ever suspected that all my labors and experiments were pointed toward one end, and one end alone."

He went over to a locked compartment which in earlier years I had wondered about and then ceased to wonder about, as I became engrossed in my work. The Professor opened it now, and I glimpsed but the usual array of bottles and test-tubes and vials. One of these vials he lifted gingerly from a rack.

"And at last I have attained the end," he almost whispered, holding the tube aloft. A pale liquid scintillated eerily against the artificial light in the ceiling. "Thirty years, long years, of ceaseless experimenting, and now, here in my hand -- success!"

The Professor's manner, the glow deep in his dark eyes, the submerged enthusiasm that seemed at every instant about to leap out, all served to impress me deeply. It must indeed be an immense thing he had done, and I ventured to say as much.

"Immense!" he exclaimed. "Immense! Why -- why it's so immense that --. But wait. Wait. You shall see for yourself."

At that time how little did I suspect the significance of his words. I was indeed to see for myself.

* * *

Carefully he replaced the vial, then walked over to the transparent wall again.

"Look!" he gestured toward the night sky. "The unknown! Does it not fascinate you? The other fools dream of some day traveling out there among the stars. They think they will go out there and learn the secret of the universe. But as yet they have been baffled by the problem of a sufficiently powerful fuel or force for their ships. And they are blind. Within a month I could solve the puny difficulty that confronts them; could, but I won't. Let them search, let them experiment, let them waste their lives away, what do I care about them?"

I wondered what he was driving at, but realized that he would come to the point in his own way. He went on:

"And suppose they do solve the problem, suppose they do leave the planet, go to other worlds in their hollow ships, what will it profit them? Suppose that they travel with the speed of light for their own life time, and then land on a star at that point, the farthest point away from here that is possible for them? They would no doubt say: 'We can now realize as never before the truly staggering expanse of the universe. It is indeed a great structure, the universe. We have traveled a far distance; we must be on the fringe of it.'

"Thus they would believe. Only I ould know how wrong they were, for I can sit here and look through this telescope and see stars that are fifty and sixty times as distant as that upon which they landed. Comparatively, their star would be infinitely close to us. The poor deluded fools and their dreams of space travel!"

"But, Professor," I interposed, "just think --"

"Wait! Now listen. I, too, have long desired to fathom the universe, to determine what it is, the manner and purpose and the secret of its creation. Have you ever stopped to wonder what the universe is? For thirty years I have worked for the answer to those questions. Unknowing, you helped me with your efficiency on the strange experiments I assigned to you at various times. Now I have the answer in that vial, and you shall be the only one to share the secret with me."

Incredulous, I again tried to interrupt.

"Wait!" he said. "Let me finish. There was the time when I also looked to the stars for the answer. I built my telescope, on a new principle of my own. I searched the depths of the void. I made vast calculations. And I proved conclusively to my own mind what had theretofore been only a theory. I know now without doubt that this our planet, and other planets revolving about the sun, are but electrons of an atom, of which the sun is the nucleus. And our sun is but one of millions of others, each with its allotted number of planets, each system being an atom just as our own is in reality.

"And all these millions of solar systems, or atoms, taken together in one group, form a galaxy. As you know, there are countless numbers of these galaxies throughout space, with tremendous stretches of space between them. And what are these galaxies? Molecules! They extend through space even beyond the farthest range of my telescope! But having penetrated that far, it is not difficult to make the final step.

"All of these far-flung galaxies, or molecules, taken together as a whole, form -- what? Some indeterminable element or substance on a great, ultramacrocosmic world! Perhaps a minute drop of water, or a grain of sand, or wisp of smoke, or -- good God! -- an eyelash of some creature living on that world!"

* * *

I could not speak. I felt myself grow faint at the thought he had propounded. I tried to think it could not be -- yet what did I or anyone know about the infinite stretches of space that must exist beyond the ranges of our most powerful telescope?

"It can't be!" I burst out. "It's incredible, it's -- monstrous!"

"Monstrous? Carry it a step further. May not that ultra-world also be an electron whirling about the nucleus of an atom? And that atom only one of millions forming a molecule? And that molecule only one of millions forming --"

"For God's sake, stop!" I cried. "I refuse to believe that such a thing can be! Where would it all lead? Where would it end? It might go on -- forever! And besides," I added lamely, "what has all this to do with -- your discovery, the fluid you showed me?"

"Just this. I soon learned that it was useless to look to the infinitely large; so I turned to the infinitely small. For does it not follow that if such a state of creation exists in the stars above us, it must exist identically in the atoms below us?"

I saw his line of reasoning, but still did not understand. His next words fully enlightened me, but made me suspect that I was facing one who had gone insane from his theorizing. He went on eagerly, his voice the voice of a fanatic:

"If I could not pierce the stars above, that were so far, then I would pierce the atoms below, that were so near. They are everywhere. In every object I touch and in the very air I breathe. But they are minute, and to reach them I must find a way to make myself as minute as they are, and more so! This I have done. The solution I showed you will cause every individual atom in my body to contract, but each electron and proton will also decrease in size, or diameter, in direct proportion to my own shrinkage! Thus will I not only be able to become the size of an atom, but can go down, down into infinite smallness!"

by Henry Hasse via Johnny Pez |  Read more:

Image: Leo Morey via

[ed. A favorite of Carl Sagan, highly regarded throughout sci-fi land, and now in the public domain. I haven't read it yet but just from initial outlines it reminds me of old college dorm room philosophy sessions : ) ]