There is no such thing as a dead person

 

Humans are gifted with the ability to imagine and plan for the future. And we are part of those plans. Our presence is the source of agency in the world, to get things done for whatever purposes we want to get things done, typically starting with the welfare of our descendants. But we are also cursed to know that not long into that future, we will die. The future will no longer contain us, but it will contain the things and people we care about.

I remember being troubled by the prospect of death in the past. The ones I remember are -- as a child of 8 or 9, as a teenager, and at some point in the early "decade starting in 2000". I was troubled enough to write this post: http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2007/11/cosmic-subtraction-problem.html, which still captures a lot of truth as I see it. It suggests thinking about the issue of death a bit, and then putting your analysis on the shelf. Indeed in the last 15-odd years I have largely ignored the issue. I do not recall it troubling me on the eve of my heart surgery in November of 2020. It has come up now once again -- perhaps in conjunction with some minor health scares.

I once read an explanation of how death figures in our lives. No matter how happy we are, no matter how successful or loved or at the peak of whatever we think of as the good life, there is that little worm gnawing away at the core: We will die someday. It's associated with a feeling: a little strand of dread if we think about it. That resonated with me.

So I write, "There is no such thing as a dead person." What could I mean? Be patient.

There surely is such a thing as a dead body. One way to feel bad about death is to imagine yourself as with your body -- bored, cold, alone, underground in a cemetery. Imagining yourself cremated might be a bit easier, as past the imagined traumatic even of incineration, there is less to imagine? But those who have examined a body that has been dead for any length of time can plainly see that there is no person left. I find it fairly easy in feeling as well as thought to dismiss the idea of us as dead people having any location in the world such as a graveyard. In part that's because what we mean by "person" is some entity with the same memories and thought processes as we have now -- our mind.

A distressing idea of death that I think arises naturally is imagining ourselves in silent darkness, as time ticks along, knowing things are happening that we will never be aware of, with nothing but infinite boredom. Those are both possibilities that I think arise just from feelings, with little rationale but still perhaps power.

Another vital ingredient of the situation is that the living must have some theory about what happens to their loved ones when they die. Religions would imagine heaven, hell, or reincarnation. I would suggest that sober people who look hard at reality rather than being guided by vague realms of hope and feelings will understand those are just not true.

Yet even those who accept that perspective have images of the dead. Our respected forebears in particular we can imagine looking over our shoulders at us, and they can inspire us to act according to our better nature as opposed to our lower instincts. In some cases (particularly true in the past, say around 1700), people traveled long distances and might well have no communication at all with those left behind. They might well not know whether their parents were dead or not, and if your parent in the flesh might appear to judge your life, you might be motivated to have lived a life they would approve of. It might be adaptive to think that way even if you know they are dead.

When we imagine our dead ancestors perhaps judging us, we envision them as immaterial observers of reality as it unfolds. I suppose this is one of the better ways you can imagine being dead, though again I think a sober person would say this is unrealistic. And there are problems. How long does this state last? Have we pushed off to the future the same problem of what happens after death when this dead person dies again?

One natural objection to death is, "But I want to see how it all turns out!" It's hard to address that one, to the extent it's our current, perhaps terminallly ill, self that is thinking it. We can reflect that over time "how it turns out" will be less and less relevant to our imagined dead self observing the world. When everyone we care about, and their descendants, die, and the world is concerned with new things we never even considered, we would care less. One future milestone is that scientists say it is certain that our planet will be incinerated when our sun becomes a red giant, in 5 billion years or so.

I guess my key point (if I have one) is that while it's natural and sensible for the living to imagine the dead as continuing to exist somewhere, this is no help at all as an individual person approaches death. Then it is time to throw off that idea, and emphasize the reality that when the living imagine the dead living on, this is happening in one place only -- inside of their living heads.

The sober reality is that none of these things will happen when we die. We will not even be in sweet oblivion. We simply no longer will be. There will in no sense be an "I' to be anywhere.

One way to possibly get a handle on this is to look at the other end of life. If we see a living, breathing baby, do we wonder where they were before they were born? Did they live in boredom through the eons, hoping some day to be born, to inhabit a body, and have a time in the world of life? No, they simply did not exist, in any sense of the word. They as a conscious being came into existence through the interplay of extremely complicated biochemical events that we are nowhere near understanding. One's nonexistence after death is just as complete and unmysterious as the nonexistence of a baby before conception.

Phrases like "Mr. Jones passed in July" are harmful in suggesting that Mr. Jones went from here to somewhere else. They presume an afterlife. "Mr. Jones passed away in July" is better, because "away" at least allows for the possibility that "away" is nothingness. "Mr. Jones died" is better still, though it leaves open the question of what happened to him. "Mr. Jones ceased to exist" might be best of all.

Corpses, ancestors who judge us, entities that hang around to find out how it turns out -- they are all natural thoughts. But when we face our own demise with the natural anxiety that comes with it, we do better to discard those ideas completely. We will cease to be. There will be no clock ticking to measure our nonexistence. There is no way to measure nonexistence. Nonexistence is... How do I finish that sentene? Nonexistence isn't. For me, entertaining this thought makes my emotional self calmer as I consider death. There is no seuch thing as a dead person.

Note: I've probably never had an original thought in my life, but that is especially clear on a subject like this, which has been debated by great minds for millenia.

Astronomically speaking, there is no "up"

 

Of course when we think about our immediate surroundings, the meaning of "up" is entirely clear. If you let something go and it falls, "up" is the other way. But suppose you back up and imagine yourself looking at the earth, the solar system, and what's beyond. Do you have an "up" in mind? I think most of us do. In diagrams, the solar system is always portrayed with the earth's north being up. There is no geophysical or or astronimical reason for thinking of things this way. Thinking of south being up makes just as much sense. The European cultures that dominated when we were standardizing our thinking about the geography of the earth and discovering details of the solar system were quite far north of the equator ("Greenwich mean time" is clearly UK-centric). North as up is a cultural decision. The fact that 90% of world population is estimated to live in the northern hemisphere would be a strong force against reversing that decision, but I suspect it did not actually have much influence on why it was chosen in the first place.

For me that is all old news. But I was surprised it took me so long to think of this next part... When you see a picture of some galaxy or other astronomical object, which way is "up"? Why is it oriented the way it is? It is not its relationship to the earth's north pole. The actual answer is that it is whatever direction the photographer chooses. It was one more tiny support for the reality of our planet being at an unremarkable spot in an unremarkable galaxy, and even "up" and "down" are arbitrary, even when we are looking out from our own particular world.

How might US political gridlock end?

 

Gridlock in US politics has been with us for twenty-odd years now, and there is no sign that it is going away any time soon. I googled for all of 15 seconds before concluding that this issue hadn't been addressed in a way I found interesting.

The gridlock could end with a series of constitutional amendments, or a constitutional convention, but surely both parties would ensure gridlock continues in that process, and even if one side got a sizable advantage they would be unable to muster approval from the required 3/4 of the states -- the ultimate supermajority.

Another way political systems change is after defeat in a war. The prospect of the US being defeated in a war seem quite remote. Our geographic isolation on our own continent, sharing borders with only the much weaker Canada and Mexico make that highly unlikely.

One way it could end is by demographic shifts that gradually bring one party to power consistently. Democrats are the candidate. But some traditional Democratic groups have significant numbers becoming Republicans, and birth rates are falling among all demographic groups, not just white people. If Republicans do see this change coming, it lends an urgency to their efforts to achieve a sufficient corruption of the democratic process that they can retain power.

The other way gridlock could end is basically a coup d'etat. Democrats are on the whole too committed to the rule of law to initiate such a thing, but as we have seen lately, notably on January 6th, the Republicans are not. If Donald Trump is re-elected without major election fraud in 2024 (as seems likely), he is likely to continue from where he left off in terms of undermining democracy. The constitution limits him to just four more years, but he could put forth his son Donald or daughter Ivanka for President, with the understanding that Donald Senior would remain firmly in charge. His Republicans could continue to impose voter registration requirements weeding out more and more of the likely Democratic voters. He could enable Republican legislatures or governors in actually submitting alternative or fraudulent vote counts in major elections. Last time around, Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell had enough integrity that they would not overturn the results of an election, but there are other Republicans waiting in the wings, likely selected by Donald Trump by way of "primarying" away moderate Republicans, who would. Trump could subtly and not so subtly intimidate the press until it is not a free press any more. The Supreme Court, with its 6-3 majority, might not invalidate any of this. If they did, Trump might simply declare that he is not bound by decisions of that Court. Would 2/3 of the Senate convict him if he was impeached for that? Surely not.

Who is left? The US military. The officer corps is (last I knew) rather firmly anti-Trump or at least pro-Constitution, and after January 6th there were purges of white supremacist officers. But if the Trump takeover happens slowly, what would provide the impetus for the military to move? The idea of a junta ruling the US for any period of time would offend just about everybody. Suppose Trump's son Donald says he won the election of 2028, when independent observers (who may be in short supply) say he didn't, by a considerable margin. Perhaps the military could decree that the Democrat actually won and see that he is installed as President. But what about Congress, which could also well be Republican, perhaps legitimately or perhaps because of the devious changes to voter eligibility? Surely the military can't simply declare the Democrats winners in all of those elections. What about the state legislatures? Trying to fairly sort out winners and losers in all those contests would be a nightmare.

With Trump in power for 4 years or more, you can imagine him starting his own purge of the military, removing officers who are not loyal to him, or at least those show any sign of taking their oath to the Constitution as meaning something beyond being loyal to their Commander-in-Chief. So then, how does the Trump family lock on power ever end?

Democrats may take to the streets in mass demonstrations at any point, but until Trump supporters change, it will not sweep the country. I think the key lies with the moderate Trump supporters. People grow tired of their leaders, and Trump would probably put in place initiatives they didn't like. Some might realize they actually have lost the power they thought they had gained by way of Trump. They may see in tangible terms that they are worse off than they were 4 years ago. If the Trump supporters in red-state America split, a substantial minority might join with the substantial Democratic minorities in (temporary, at least) support of Democratic nominees. If they can see that their candidates for Congress actually won the majority in an election and the Trump functionaries have declared for the Republican, they might take to the streets. And if people take to the streets in large enough numbers in the heartland as well as on the coasts, that is when the government might fall. I tend to think that the US military is unlikely to slaughter their countrymen in large numbers.

The US Constitution is so venerable that the pressure to keep that form of government might be intense, but if post-Trump majorities are large enough, they could put through amendments that could help solve the problem. They could vest all power in a majority in the House of Representatives -- the way a great many other democracies in the world work. They could do this by reducing the Senate to a ceremonial body, and giving the House the power to remove the President by a simple majority vote. They could seriously limit the power of the Supreme Court. Then we could have largely solved the problem of gridlock, and restored a working democracy to the US.

If the Trump operatives are sneaky enough, they might keep their fingers on the pulse of the people and do enough to placate moderate Trump voters so that this scenario would not play out. If the Trump forces gave only limited resistance to popular pressure, then the result of a reversal might be Democratic control -- for a while -- within the current Constitutional system, leading to further gridlock. It would be only the removal of a government very widely perceived to be illegitimate that could give the huge supermajorities needed for constitutional amendments.

I feel like I have just pained a very unlikely scenario. A series of steps have to happen, and you could argue that many of them are unlikely, and the entire sequence especially so.

What is the alternative? A government that proceeds by inertia, keeping pretty much the same policies as it has now. There will be no major new initiatives. We will keep funding a huge and largely useless military. No infrastructure repair. China will dominate the world stage, offset to some extent by Germany and other key European Union members. The US will get poorer and shabbier. The Republican heartland is already getting poor and shabby, and it will spread to the areas that are now fairly prosperous and well-maintained. But the rich will keep getting richer.

That's how I see the political future in the US. Any alternative ideas for how things might go?

Thirty years ago was the milestone

Tomorrow we will all take note of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Some people suggest that we lost something profound that day, that fear changed our outlook, and it hasn't recovered since. This perplexes me. If so, it's been primarily a fabulous public relations coup by radical Islamic groups.

From the very beginning I feared the public reaction to the 9/11 attacks far more than any current or future damage. This public overreaction led to the disastrous invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

What really changed the world was something that happened ten years earlier -- not to the day, but a mere 20 days before an exact decade. August 21, 1991 was the day that the attempted coup to preserve a hard-line government of the USSR failed. That was the day we knew the Cold War was over. From roughly 1950 to that day in 1991, the US and USSR led coalitions of nations in a global competition, where each side had a large arsenal of nuclear weapons. Huge budgets supported the military on each side. Small nations suffered as the two superpowers vied for influence or control. Perhaps the nuclear weapons kept American and Soviet forces from engaging each other directly in any military action, but the price was the uncertainty of nuclear war.

As of 1988, most people saw no end in sight to that Cold War -- we judged that we were nearly 40 years into a standoff that could continue for another 100 years. In hindsight, we can see that it would be over in three years, but that was not our mindset at the time. This was an unprecedented standoff. How could anyone dare to overthrow a government with nuclear weapons at its disposal?

After that date in 1991, the danger of nuclear war decreased dramatically. Military budgets were cut, former Soviet republics declared independence. It's not as if all is well. Russia has considerable power, but it is unable to seriously consider conquering Ukraine, the second-largest of the former Soviet Republics. NATO is watching closely and has offered Ukraine a measure of protection, and Russia knows it.

What has happened in the 20 years since 9/11? Here's a list of Islamic terrorist incidents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Islamist_terrorist_attacks

They are tragic in their own way, of course. But they do not threaten the stability of our world. The casualty figures are nothing compared to the deaths in the wars in Vietnam or Korea, or any number of other civil wars throughout the world that were fueled by superpower confrontation. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were a reaction to 9/11, but they were very much wars of choice. The US could have stayed home. We bear the primary responsibility for both wars and the resulting death and destruction.

The world improved dramatically for the better 30 years ago. If Islamic terrorists have made us feel profoundly unsafe in the past 20 years, it's a dramatic public relations coup on their part. The images of the twin towers falling are dramatic and stay seared in memory, but the real significance of that and every terrorist attack since has been minor. Public relations.

Profound change happened 30 years ago, not 20 years ago, but that anniversary was not marked, at least not to anywhere near the same extent.

Insurance

 

It's a sensible idea, insurance is. When a group of people is faced with the small chance of a future loss that would be catastrophic, each one puts in a small amount, and the unlucky individual gets paid from that fund and their loss is largely compensated.

However, one constant in the situation is that someone is making money by selling insurance. On average, you will lose money, so there's good reason to avoid it if you can cover the loss yourself.

One supposed benefit to whole-life insurance is that it builds a cash value over time. Yet you can build cash over time without those by simply saving some of your money. Perhaps it helps build value by fighting against the natural human tendency to spend what you have, and not save unless you are forced to do so.

My father bought for me at age 13 a whole-life insurance policy. I believed he waited until I was 21 to tell me about it and hand it over to me. I debated what to do with it, looking at various upsides and downsides. There were a couple years when I could borrow its cash value at the guaranteed 5% rate and invest it in the money market to earn 14%, but those days didn't last long.

When I had children, I needed insurance with a much higher death benefit than that policy provided, ($15,000?) and got some term insurance (was it for $250,000? I don't remember). After debating another year or two, I just cashed out the old policy. The main benefit was that I would no longer wonder what to do with it. The decision was made. Life was a little bit simpler.

I held the term insurance until my daughters grew up, then canceled it. I got the term insurance through Amica, a company my family had used for auto insurance, based on a sense of good customer service and loyalty. I later was told that if I had known how to shop around, I could have gotten the term insurance for half the price. Well, I didn't know how to do that.

A few years ago all my peers were considering long-term care insurance, and a fair number bought it. My instinct said not to. I still don't know if it was the right thing to do, but news stories recently tell of troubles in the marketplace. There is always fine print... my memory now is that when I checked, I found it would not cover care provided outside of the US or care needed due to self-inflicted injury. I believe that without insurance, if a person of modest means needs expensive long-term care, they spend down their assets to $2,000 and then they are covered by Medicaid, as they are then poor enough to qualify. They are not put out on the street. That seemed like a reasonable fallback position.

I owned a house jointly with my then-wife for 9 years, and of course insurance is required, and I don't recall having much choice about it. It was the only time in my life that I have been in debt.

Car loans require insurance on the car, but I have been fortunate enough to always be able to buy my (simple, no frills) cars with cash. I kept collision and comprehensive for the first year or two the one time I bought a new car, but I've mostly done without. I'm a good driver. In general, good driver discounts are not as much as they should be in a hard-nosed rational system. Even with the discounts, good drivers subsidize the drivers who would otherwise rapidly price themselves out of the ability to get any insurance at all after a few accidents. Being a good driver who avoids extreme conditions and rarely parks in hazardous places, I'm less of a risk than the actuarial tables would suggest.

With Amica, my current annual auto premium is $409. That puts an upper limit on what I could save if I shopped around.

I recall hearing a few years back that air bags did not actually reduce fatalities from auto accidents. Knowing the air bag was there reduced the caution of some drivers. Less caution combined with air bags led to a constant death rate. I suspect that my knowledge that I don't have collision insurance makes me a little bit more cautious as I drive.

Insurance always comes with hitches, or so it seems. There's a deductible. For minor accidents, the advice is to pay to repair collision damage yourself, or else the increase in your premium will outweigh any benefit you received.

For a couple years towards the end of their lives, I was managing my parents' finances. They owned a house near the beach on Cape Cod, and insurance was considerable. The house was considered a "tear down" -- anyone who bought it would tear down the modest house and build a bigger one on the lot. Sentiment about keeping the house versus selling it was divided in the family, and any sort of major damage would push us over the line into selling. I had the brilliant idea of canceling the insurance. There would be no point in rebuilding a house if it was to be torn down. A smoldering cellar hole was no less valuable than a house that was to be torn down. The other purpose of the policy was liability. I inquired if we could get a cheaper policy that covered only liability, but was told that a custom policy would in fact be more expensive. Given the incredibly low chance of liability for a simple house that was vacant most of the time, I suspect we would have been better off without the policy. But as an agent for my parents, prudence dictated we keep it.

I mentioned that part of my judgment on not getting collision or comprehensive was comparing myself to the pool of people who would pay similar rates. You may have reason to think you are at a higher risk than the pool, in which case insurance becomes attractive. Apparently there was a period in the early days of the AIDS epidemic when people understood the symptoms that implied imminent death, but the insurance companies did not have the mechanism to take AIDS into account in setting policy premiums. Some of the AIDS victims bought very expensive life insurance policies, and surely their heirs benefited greatly.

When I bought my current car, a used Toyota Yaris, the seller looked at me like I was crazy when I said I would not be getting collision or comprehensive. Reaching the conclusions I have about insurance seems to be rare. I wonder if others have different perspectives.

As for health insurance (shudder)... That's a topic for another day.

The state of the world is awful

 This is an emotional judgment. I feel things are really bad, and getting worse. The situation is very discouraging.

Most of my blog posts have been from the realm of thinking, and how thinking should often correct our feelings about things.

I have often argued that in many ways, things are better now than they have ever been before in the US, for instance in terms of health care, women's rights, and the availability of knowledge and entertainment to all. They say extreme poverty is overall falling (even though sub-Saharan Africa is an exception). Here's one reference (chosen almost haphazardly) supporting that idea: http://www.fao.org/3/i2280e/i2280e04.pdf.

Those promising facts are background just as climage change is really beginning to show what it has in store for us. I like to think that Covid-19, though a real nuisance, is only a temporary blip. But it is a reminder that if the next pandemic is high-mortality and highly contagious, it is one significant threat to the world order as we know it.

Donald Trump is out of office, but the forces that put him there are still very much alive and well. In the wake of the 2020 election, there were enough Republican elected officials with the backbone to say, "No, sorry, the numbers don't lie, and Trump lost." If he had had another 4 years to work with, it's less clear how things would have developed. And the prospect of him and a successor regaining power for 8 or more years in 2024 is quite real. I have just been reading William Shirer's "Berlin Diary", and am somewhat reassured that Hitler's control of Germany even before the war was much more overt and draconian than anything in the US in the Trump years.

Forces of intolerance and fascism are at large throughout the world.

Prospects in the US of something as simple as a long-overdue $350 billion infrastructure package are still very iffy. The debacle in Afghanistan was due to a non-partisan intelligence failure, and it was going to hurt no matter when the withdrawal happened, but Biden will lose political capital from it. (Could we basically buy the lives of the people we want to protect, by quietly making a certain amount of transitional financial assistance dependent on getting some out and letting the others continue to live in safety?)

The US will continue to see its influence decline. China is a rising power, but so far comparatively benevolent as rising powers go. It seems unlikely this will change the status quo of there being no threats of rich nations fighting full scale wars against each other.

But the emotional truth is that climate change is here for the long run, it is irreversible, and the only question is just how bad it will be. I think we as a species simply lacked the ability to prevent it, which is a dim reflection on our species. Perhaps a conjunction of radical green dictatorships over much of the world could have done something. It would have been highly unlikely, but I can't think of a more realistic scenario.

Aside from climate change, we can imagine all of these things coming and going in the decades and centuries to come. But substituting climate change for assassination, "But other than that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?" rings bitterly true.

I can say comforting things on an intellectual level about every aspect of the world situation except climate change. But all the rest feels bad too.

This comes as I have re-established a level of stability in my personal life. I was forced to move this summer, a lurking possibility for a few years, but landed in a very nice one-bedroom apartment in Watlham (10 Middle Street Court, Apartment 4, Waltham, 02451). It has central A/C, an elevator if I need it, and laundry in-unit. It costs a bit more, but I've decided I can afford it. And above all, all of my medical problems seem to be stable for the moment.

Even so, the world feels awful.

World War II Surprises

 

There is a great deal of information on the web. In such matters as "what happened in World War II?" (in contrast to current events) you can hope it is mostly accurate. Studs Terkel wrote a book called "The Good War", about World War II. It qualified for that status because the US achieved complete victory over evil foes. I suppose that's one reason I focus on it rather than later conflicts. Militarily, it was also the last war between more or less symmetrical forces. Since then it's been almost entirely a large, rich nation against insurgents or a much weaker foe.

A few things I think I've learned -- at least strong possibilities to consider.

1. The German invasion of France in 1940 was rapidly successful. But commentators now suggest this was not a predestined outcome due to a fool-proof superior German strategy. Some commentators have said that the Germans got insanely lucky. Hitler, in launching the invasion, did not expect quick victory, but a war that would cost millions of German lives. It was not a planned Blitzkrieg invasion, they say, but rather the success of the invasion in the way it unfolded led the Germans to think such a strategy might work elsewhere too. One French problem that might have been hard to foresee, for instance, was that they had committed their troops in a forward position, but could not bring them back effectively when required because the roads were clogged with civilians fleeing the Germans.

2. The German invasion of the USSR did not come close to defeating them. While the Germans made large territorial gains in 1941, they did so at enormous cost to their own forces. The Soviet military (and the economy to support it) was much larger than the Germans had thought, and that was what ultimately made the difference.

3. There were several assassination attempts against Hitler, and he seemed quite lucky in dodging all of them. There was a speculation that if the Army had succeeded in killing him in the best known of these (the briefcase that got moved), the coup by the professional army would have quickly failed. Nazi forces would very soon have regained control of the country. Goring would be the supreme leader. However, it is possible that Goring would have understood the hopelessness of the German position much sooner than Hitler did, and for instance surrendered a year earlier, saving a great deal of destruction.

4. Now, to Japan. The story I had always heard was that Emperor Hirohito was merely a puppet, and all power lay with the cabinet. The latest is that this was normally true, but when it came time to decide whether to surrender around August 10th, 1945, the cabinet was evenly split, 3 to 3, and in that environment he did cast the deciding vote in favor of surrender. There was not some large peace faction. The Japanese decision was not determined primarily by the atomic bombs. It was far more influenced by the Soviet entry into the war and their potential to quickly invade and occupy Japan's holdings on the Asian mainland and the northern island of Hokkaido. Their defenses were geared to combat a US invasion from the south, not a Soviet invasion from the west.

5. Japan was not a force of pure evil leading up to 1941. Seeking to be a great power, they invaded China and increased their holdings there gradually. The French had previously done that in Indochina, the British in India and Malaysia, the Dutch in Indonesia, and the US in the Philippines. While the Japanese occupation of China was brutal, so was the US occupation of the Philippines. I am still looking for references on how the atrocities compared across these various colonial conquests.

The impetus for war came with the Japanese occupation of Indochina. The French gave permission for this -- the Vichy government, a puppet state of Germany, which was Japan's ally. The US and other western powers didn't demanded that they withdraw, and the US immediately froze all Japanese assets in the US and imposed an oil embargo, cutting off 80% of Japan's oil supply and a great of its other trade. That was a huge disruption to Japan's economy. A US ultimatum demanded Japan's withdrawal from not just Indochina but from all of China. There was some evidence that the US was trying to goad the Japanese into war, so the US could enter the war to help Germany and also deal with Japan. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor served that purpose quite nicely.

Pearl Harbor was a strategic miscalculation by a great power. The US economy was roughly five times the size of Japan's in 1941, and when the US responded with all-out war to that attack, their fate was sealed. But none of that really adds up to Japanese evil.

A grave moral question hovers over the extensive bombing of German and Japanese cities by the US and Britain. They knew they were killing large numbers of civilians with many of their attacks, even if a few military targets were included. If we're thinking about "evil", that US policy must be weighed against Japanese atrocities in China, for instance.

Along with information, another lesson of the internet age is that any of it might be false. I welcome corrections to any of what I have written.

Telephones

 A few of my (few) readers are older than I am, and can easily "one-up" me when I speak of "the old days", but I'll set that aside and be happy to hear of your own experiences. To set the stage, I am 66 years old.

Phones already existed in my youth. In my home town of Durham, New Hampshire, you could dial anyone else in town with 4 digits. The exchange was 868 and I believe all the 4-digit numbers began with 2. There were party lines. One ring for one party, and two rings for the other. You could eavesdrop on your neighbor's calls by simply picking up the phone to listen. A private line cost more. I believe I heard of 8-party lines. Even they made sense if you saw the phone as a way to convey very brief messages of a factual and time-sensitive nature, such as when your train would be arriving. They were an add-on to a way of life that was pretty good as it was, without the telephone.

The rule when making a call was to let the phone ring ten times before deciding the person you called was not home. That was a full minute. You can imagine the recipient finishing the paragraph they were reading in the newspaper, folding it and standing, stretching, and then walking down one corridor and another before arriving at the single phone in the house and answering. A different pace of life. Phones very rarely just ring these days without someone picking up, but if you waited a full minute, someone on the other end who was deliberately not answering their phone would think you were... emotional, in some way or other.

My grandfather knew his phone exchange as 'Bigelow 4". On the keypad "BI" mapped to "24" and thus the entire thing to "244". Perhaps that was supposed to be easier to remember. The phones only had 24 letters on them -- Q and Z were missing. Around 1980 a friend told another friend that if she dialed 800-POLISHQ she could hear a Polish joke. She took the bait and when she reached the end, she laughed, getting the joke, sensitive to the fact that there was no Q on the phone. The idea that it was just implicitly between P and R wouldn't have occurred to us.

Most phones were comfortingly heavy things that you leased from AT&T. No need to hold onto the base when dialing -- the weight was enough to keep the phone in place. Phones were all dial phones. In the same mind-set that expected you to wait a minute for someone to answer, the time it took you to dial 999-9099 was of no concern. I believe it was 1970 when I saw my first push-button phone, at a friend's house. I don't know how much thought went into the design, but it does intrigue that I do not believe that keypad design has changed in the 50 years since.

Then there came the message machine. After some number of rings (I don't think it was 10 -- more like 5, perhaps?) the machine came on with a prerecorded greeting and you could leave your message. First they were a novelty, then they were common, and there came a point where someone was strange if they didn't have one. When I was in France on a brief visit and heard a message machine come on, I briefly thought, "Wow, they work in French too!" before realizing how silly that was.

And then there is the Business Phone. I have few memories of the early days, probably because I didn't have much occasion to call businesses when I was young. As late as 1972, at a summer job right out of high school, I was tasked with calling ten textbook publishers to ask for what books they had in some specific field. A long-distance call was a Big Deal. And I was supposed to make ten of them in a row! Even though it wasn't my family's money, I was very sensitive to spending somebody's $2.00 a minute, no small sum in 1972 dollars. Perhaps my long-term anxiety was a bit less after I had made those ten calls.

Businesses developed phones with rows of transparent cubical buttons on the bottom to deal with multiple lines. The concept arose of putting someone on hold, of seeing which of several lines might be free. The job of "secretary" was still going strong, and that was part of the job. The human secretary took the messages, often on small pink pads of paper.

This and message machines jointly created "telephone tag", where parties would call each other back and forth and leave messages, neither making it a high priority to actually answer calls.

A friend had worked as a secretary at the Pentagon, and she noted that when officers called each other by way of their secretaries, the lower-ranking officer was obliged to come on the phone first. If the two were of the same rank, the one who achieved that rank first was higher in the pecking order, and tables were available to the secretaries to look this information up.

I don't know when it began... I would have guessed 1984 or so, as it impacted my life? The dreaded development was the business where an automated system answered your call, and after describing several options you were to press one key on your keypad. Businesses are always trying to save money, and it's easy to see how this could save them some secretarial time. If all you did want to know was the store hours, the street address, or the fax number, an automated system could give you that information. It might take you ten times as long as if you could simply ask a human who answered for that information, but that time was your time, not the time of an employee of the company. Soon there came to be one button press leading to a litany of further choices. Sometimes, after all that, you were actually directed to a human. However, you might be "waiting for the next available agent". In the old days, you had no idea how long you might be waiting. In more recent years, the company will often give you some estimate. In either case, this provided a very good justification for "speaker phone" mode.

I remember being annoyed when I first heard "please listen carefully as our menu options have changed". Surely they would give me the date on which they last changed so I could tell if I had to listen or not? No way. It just became a piece of boilerplate.

There came a time when after making a choice the phone might emit a couple tones at a volume to wake the dead, part of their internal signaling system where one electronic agent conveyed information to another, at the expense of your eardrums.

I have had the experience a few times recently, after some elaborate maze of choices and holds, a voice finally came on the line, and, it was -- a real human! It was almost startling.

Of course there was another way the companies came to be saving money besides handling as many calls with automated messages as possible. The expected delays were sufficiently burdensome that you might often just not make your call, deciding you could live without that information.

To my awareness, Google was the first company that simply dispensed with customer service entirely, at least for ordinary users. It surely saved Google a LOT of money. The theory was that the information was available online somewhere, or you could find a forum and ask your question and perhaps find an answer. I think companies also stopped trying to write user-friendly documentation. Some enterprising geeks would have written their own versions, and quite likely at least one of them was better than anything the company would write (and they could avoid time-consuming reviews for accuracy and completeness).

The one place where the trend seems to be slower than elsewhere is the health care sector. I find I can often get a human being pretty quickly at the doctor's or dentist's office. I speculate this is because those businesses are not under the same cut-throat competition as others.

But I do really long for the days when after you bought a product from XYZ Corporation, if you had a problem you could dial a number, and immediately talk with a knowledgeable person who could solve your problem!

Review of the movie 'Ponette'

 

Just last night I saw "Ponette", a 1996 French movie. It had been on my list for some time, but it just made its way into Netflix's DVD collection. It is about a 4-year-old girl (Ponette) whose mother dies in a car crash, and her efforts to come to terms with the loss, including being unclear on whether her mother might come back, or at least speak to her. Emotional intelligence suggests she could use some patient listening and affection from the adults around her, but they instead are annoyed with her for not accepting her mother's death.

Most of the characters are children around her age. Ponette (and the other children too) are doing a terrific job acting -- not just saying lines. And it is not just a few lines here and there. It is a full movie's worth. That acting is extraordinary in it own right. Ponette is not helped by having an atheist father (who can only visit briefly now and then) but an aunt and other adults who give different versions of Catholic theology, garbled by the other children's questionable interpretations as well. My enthusiasm was tempered a bit when I had to remind myself that it was the director who wrote the lines the children say. It is a tribute to their acting ability that I was so easily taken in to think that was what they were saying and thinking in the moment. The director has picked a movie's worth of entirely plausible lines.

This aspect reminds me a bit of <this stunning piece>  where a mother has her small daughter say things the daughter has said to her over time. There is no pretense that she is saying them in the moment, but her voice in restating them makes them more compelling.

Is her mother to be resurrected now, or later? Jesus was resurrected, but that is different. God is listening to our prayers and answers them (Ponette's skepticism on this point arises earlier in life than most people's). Her mother is at the right hand of God. Ponette would like to die so she can join her mother in heaven. One boy cruelly tells her that her mother's death is her fault, and only very bad children make their mothers die. Her mother comes to her in a dream, but dreams are not real. One girl says she herself is a child of God but to get to be one you have to pass a series of tests. You could imagine a Unitarian-Universalist mini-course on the theology Ponette struggles with (just kidding).

The one problem with the movie (and on searching I found that Roger Ebert agreed with me) is that Ponette's mother makes an appearance in the flesh at the very end. I initially thought this might be some aunt who was taking the role of her mother in an effort to help her, but it becomes clear that it is magical realism instead. Ponette has been dealing with a confusing and harsh reality up to that point, and the movie betrays us (and Ponette) by giving it up. But the movie stands on its own without that ending.

Evidence-Based Abortion

 

This post is inspired by "The Last Children of Down Syndrome", by Sarah Zhang, in the December 2020 issue of "The Atlantic". The starting point of the article is how few children with Down syndrome are being born in Denmark, a country which offers to all women free genetic testing. Abortion is not just legal, but socially accepted and even expected in cases where Down syndrome is detected. The article raises many issues, but my main reaction is that it is examining a subject that is "tame" in many respects, and more interesting questions arise if we let the wild beasts loose and discuss those issues.

Zhang tells us that when people do have a Down Syndrome child, they typically love him or her and feel glad they did not abort him or her. By extension, those who are considering an abortion also realize they would likely feel the same way if they let the pregnancy continue. Going beyond the premise of the article, this is surely the case for the far more common situation where a woman aborts because she does not want any child at that time. Some women regret that choice, but a great many do not. For those women, a fetus is not a child with the rights of a child, but just a potential child.

As an aside, I join most people in feeling that a woman has an inalienable right to bring to term any pregnancy she has, regardless of what she knows about it.

One of the key elements is information. In the old days, pregnant women knew only that they were going to bear a child (or perhaps two) and knew nothing about them. With prenatal screening, there is some information, and an ability to choose. When is there too much information?

I read an intriguing short story not long ago about a society where they could determine the exact genetic sequence that a woman or man would contribute to a baby if they were to have intercourse right then. This doesn't require much fiction for women, where the identity of the egg and its genetic make-up are in fact determined, and the only scientific problem is how to detect it. It is less plausible for men, but you could imagine technology that would somehow identify the one sperm that would do the fertilizing. The story continues to include an app on each person's phone that would automatically be loaded with that genetic sequence, and an app that can combine them so it knows the genome of the baby that would result if the two of them had sex. Technology had also advanced to the point where they could "age-progress" this genetic sequence forward and get a good indication of what the child would look like, its IQ, its likes and dislikes, and its mannerisms. You could look at a little video of the child you could make with this person you're with. Faced with shrinking populations, governments might subsidize the program!

I expect this is a world that would drive people crazy with anxiety and grief. There is no physical embryo whose rights a person might want to protect, but there is an "informational baby". If you're sitting next to someone at a concert, or waiting in some line, or in your aerobics class, the two of you looking at your phones can see a potential baby. But if you don't have intercourse with that person, such a baby will never exist. If a woman turns to the man on the other side of her, the profile of a different baby will appear. The failure to have intercourse with each of these other people is killing a baby whose properties you can identify. TMI today stands "too much information" and is used today in a lighthearted way, but in this imaginary but possible world it would apply with full force.

One aspect that is absent from most debates about abortion is what the economists would dryly call "opportunity cost". If you live in a world where pregnancies are planned, terminating one baby likely results in the creation of another one. On its more ominous side, carrying the one baby to term precludes life of another baby, even if we in fact don't know anything about its properties.

As for knowing you will love any baby you get, consider this case. A woman who would never have an abortion gets pregnant by a brutal rape. Chances are that the resulting baby will be as delightful and charming as any other baby. Beholding her delightful 3-year-old, can the woman say she is glad she was raped, since otherwise she wouldn't have the baby? She might say that, but surely no one wants to work backwards and offer it as an excuse for rape. Imagine a rapist in our science fiction world showing his victim the baby that would be born if he follows through with his rape, and telling the woman that unless he rapes her she is denying that baby a chance at life. We are in the territory of moral nightmare.

As a result of all those considerations, I feel like a woman should choose whether or not to continue a pregnancy, armed with whatever information she has, without any moral qualms. Sarah Zhang is shocked by a parent of a Down syndrome baby saying, "we would have asked for abortion if we knew". She shouldn't be shocked. A mother after a bitter divorce can say, "I wish I hadn't married him" without betraying her children by that marriage. Telling your child, "I wish you had never been born!" is typically a very bad thing, said in the heat of anger about one's current feelings. But if in a calm and loving moment, as a result of questioning and honest conversation, you admit to your child that they were the result of an unplanned pregnancy that upset you a great deal, that is just telling the truth.

An issue that the article touches on is that of removing heritable genes from the gene pool. Down syndrome is not caused by the allele of a particular gene, and in fact those with Down syndrome very rarely have children themselves in any case. If the genes for Tay-Sachs or cystic fibrosis plummet in the population, few people will mourn. There are other genes that we will identify that tend to make a person dumber, less attractive, less athletic, less outgoing... and we will argue about those. But, to get whimsical for a moment, suppose there were a detectable gene that strongly predisposes a person to become a Republican. That would invite a field day of comment and argument.

A far more consequential form of screening is the abortion of girl fetuses, notably in India. Here the undesirable trait to be eliminated is in fact a necessary trait of one of the two parents. How do Indian women feel about having their girl babies aborted? Perhaps the same culture that allows such a practice enforces silence on women about such issues. Perhaps there are such articles that I do not know about. Or perhaps the women share the same set of beliefs. I have heard of Jewish mothers who are elated to find they have given birth to a son, since the life of a woman is so hard in Judaism (as they see it).

My conclusion that people should choose whether to abort fetuses given what they know does not address this case in India. My view does not allow for moral outrage at the termination of any particular girl fetus. If a family from any culture has three girls and chooses to abort female fetuses until they get a son, my principles don't object to that, and similarly a family of three boys can abort male fetuses until they get a daughter.

To the extent I deplore society-wide selective girl abortion (and I do) it has to be on other grounds. A topic for another day.

Lots of photons

If a person is inclined to think about the very small or the very large, huge numbers arise. One billion trillion stars in the observable universe. (10 to the 21st power). As for atoms in the human body? 10 to the 27th power. But exponents in the 20s are just symbols for us -- we have no intuitive sense of them.

One way of making large numbers real has had me going "wow!" lately. Photons. Lots of photons. Consider a fixed cubic millimeter of space, say in your front yard. A millimeter is about one 25th of an inch. A cubic millimeter is the size of a sesame seed, roughly? A sunflower seed is too big. If you stand three feet away and look through it, you see something on the other side, and let's assume that it's three feet away, and it might be something different from what you see through the cubic millimeter right next to it. (Let's say you've got one eye closed to keep it simpler). It also might change rapidly in brightness or color. Think of a strong wind blowing the leaves on a bush. The light reaches your eye from each point on that bush as it changes. But back to a single point, this happens because a steady stream of photons is traveling from that point on the bush through your chosen cubic millimeter of space to your eye. If you move your eye one millimeter to the left, there is a different steady stream of photons going through that central millimeter at a very slightly different angle. This continues as you move around in a circle, one millimeter at a time. It continues as you lower your head a bit or stand on tiptoes. And of course it continues if you could move your eye further up or down to each square millimeter on the surface of a 6-foot sphere. From each of those locations, you receive a different steady stream of photons from the point directly opposite you that travels through the original cubic millimeter in the middle. My quick calculation is that there are 10 million separate square millimeters on your 6-foot sphere, but you probably get a more intuitive understanding of the size if you think of it one millimeter at a time than 10 million (1 to the 7th power).

There's also a steady stream at every different wavelength of light in the point you see. Say there are 20 relevant wavelengths/colors of visible light your eye can distinguish.

Doesn't it seem like it would get awfully crowded in that cubic millimeter, with all those photons whizzing through? But they hardly ever bump into each other. Each travels in a straight line, unaffected by all the others.

I chose a millimeter to keep it at a size we can understand, though in fact light likely travels reliably in a certain direction at angles much more precise than that. If the Hubble Telescope turns its very sensitive eye in a particular direction, it counts on a stream of photons traveling through light years at exactly the right angle to fill in an accurate image, distinguishing tiny angles, while an equally accurate image would be formed pointing the telescope in each direction, or positioning the telescope at a slightly different location and then going through all the directions. That's a lot of photons! Though the Hubble takes a long exposure because it is not such a steady stream at such tiny gradations and it's adding them up.

Different things make different people go, "Wow!" But that's my candidate for the day. I wonder if anyone who's gone further than me in physics (which was one high school course) could tell me if I've got this right or not.

A Lighter Topic -- Quabbin, Wachusett, and Ware

 

After discussing how hard it is to combat racism and how bleak the political outlook is, I figured it's time for a lighter topic.

A few decades ago I learned a bit about the system that provides water to Boston and surrounding communities. Here's the gist: Quabbin is a big reservoir far away, and Wachusett is a smaller reservoir half way to Boston, and the Ware River is halfway between the reservoirs. What I learned then is that there is a tunnel from the Ware River to the Quabbin, and depending on conditions, water might flow through the tunnel east or it might flow west. When there's lots of water flowing (like, lots of rain), the excess Ware River water goes west to help fill the Quabbin. When there's less water, the Ware River is undisturbed, and water from Quabbin flows east past the Ware River and into the Wachusett reservoir. I thought it was very clever.

The web did not exist when I first heard of this a few decades ago, but now it is so easy to get information! I checked today to see if it's true, and apparently it is. What's more, it's still true (you can imagine water usage patterns changing in the interim). The system is a little bit, kind of, like breath feeding bagpipes. The bag holds enough air you don't need to breathe into it all the time.

The Ware River is of course long, and the key point on it for this purpose is the Ware River Diversion.

Today the new thing I learned is that sometimes (when Ware River water is about to be shut off, I think), it is used to fill a natural siphon that lifts the Quabbin water high enough so that near the Wachusett it is used to generate electricity. Detail: the turbines can only handle so much water, though, so if there's more flowing east, then some of it is diverted straight to the Wachusett.

Reasoning about it, it looks like while the Ware River water could be used to generate electricity when there is plenty of water, it is more valuable as water to be used later than a source of power, so the water flows west and the turbines sit unused.

Figure 3 in <this paper> is the one I can make most sense of. First, note that the Ware River is way up in the air compared to the two reservoirs. Since when is a river higher than the land on both sides of it? In this case, I guess it is.

The western pipe has to be deep enough that it can feed water eastward even when water levels are very low. But that is so deep that you can't make use of the water's drop in elevation to generate power when water levels are higher. The siphon lets them take that water heading east and then lift it up high enough so they can get power out of it when it goes downhill again, near the Wachusett.

Or maybe the pipes near the Ware River aren't all that deep, and the system relies on a siphon to just get the water out of the Quabbin even when water levels are low? I can't tell.

I didn't even try looking at the subject of the paper. The idea is that humans have to make decisions about how to set the various valves, and optimal operation requires the right decisions. The paper describes dynamic prediction about this. Lots of scary equations there. But I thought the basic plan was interesting enough to write about!

A Bleak Political Outlook

 

Lee Hays, a singer with the Weavers, was in ill health in the early 1980s. A concert was held in his honor, at a time when Reaganism challenged a liberal consensus that had held for nearly 50 years. It was disheartening to the left. At the concert he said, "This too will pass". It did, for a while. When it did, we got the conservative Democrat Bill Clinton. But then George W. Bush was elected. Truth was on its way out. He was the worst President there had ever been in so many ways. That too passed, and we got Barack Obama, a man of great integrity whose biggest flaw was that he was too nice. Then Donald Trump, a figure so destructive of the foundations of American democracy that he made George W. Bush look positively wonderful in comparison.

This too has passed -- at least for the moment. Democrats gained control of Presidency and Senate, while retaining control of the House! But scratch the surface and things do not look so good. 47% of voters were sufficiently unperturbed by Donald Trump's assault on democracy to vote for him for a second term. Joe Biden got 51%. But the Democratic House majority shrank to just 4 seats, and the Senate majority relies on the single tie-breaking vote of the Vice President. Still, there is the potential to pass some major things. Maybe Americans will see how great a reasonable level of government spending can be and reconsider Democrats more positively. A big stimulus package passed, but now an infrastructure bill is in trouble, as a single dissenting Democratic vote will kill it. The ground is ripe for any Democrat to insist on their one pet issue, for many to follow the few, and for the entire thing to fail.

What's more, if two-thirds of Republicans still think the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, will they or the other third have any prospect of seeing accurately the benefits of a bill and ascribing them to the party that passed the bill?

Democrats also have some explosive issues that threaten their unity. "Woke" culture is intensely unpopular among much of the population, including swing voters. (The "cancel culture" part is intensely unpopular across a wider range, including me). Disavowing woke culture would make a key part of the Democratic base stay home. One specific version now plays out now with regard to Israel and Palestine, where the "woke" viewpoint is assertively pro-Palestinian, and a great many moderate American Jews will not be pleased. We still have issues over how much of a human rights travesty it is that a few trans people might be forced to use the "other" bathroom. All these issues pose a serious threat to the fragile majority the Democrats put together. 2022 threatens to be the year that Senate and House split decisively for the Republicans, and Biden sits in the White House for two more years, unable to do anything. If a Republican Senate blocks a Biden Supreme Court nominee, we could face the prospect of the 6-3 conservative majority of the court (after being 6-2 for a while) becoming 7-2 in the early months of 2025. The prospect of solid Republican control of the government in early 2025 seems very likely indeed. Then they can simply repeal anything good that Biden and the Democrats do manage to pass in the next two years.

In my <previous post> I argued for moderation on the issue of racial justice. I expect many liberals will disagree with me strenuously -- and their opposition is part of what will likely seal a long-term Republican majority.

I wish I could see one consideration that suggests any gains for Democrats.

Others have noted that Trump might have been aiming to be an anti-democratic strong man, but was hampered by a great many imperfections unrelated to that quest (blatant self-enrichment, gratuitous insults, etc.) The new president in 2025 might just be a Republican, but he might also be a potential strong man without all the Trump disadvantages (or he might be Trump himself -- groan).

So what's going to happen? The US will shrink from international commitments, leaving world leadership to China. The rich will get richer. The poor will get poorer. We will barrel on into climate catastrophe. More and more Blacks will be disenfranchised. Cruelty to immigrants will increase. Spending on infrastructure will shrink to the point where the US becomes just another country in decline, if not exactly a Third World Country. Will Republicans somehow package the repeal of Social Security, Medicare, and the rest of the social safety net as a good thing, ridding us of evil that the Democrats foisted upon us? Will it become perilous to criticize the government?

"This too will pass." I suppose that once this Republican majority settles in there will emerge fissures and dissatisfactions. Even if we cannot see them now, they will emerge, but the readjustments they cause may well not rise to the level of creating anything resembling the bare bones of a just and democratic society I would like to see.

I would like to believe that in the long run things will get better, but it is hard these days. Very hard.

Racism as one of many comparable problems

 

Some of my (few) readers tell me they appreciate my thinking outside the box. And today's post is outside the box.

My thesis is that while racism against Blacks in the US is real and serious, it would be best not to place it in the top tier of problems we should be dealing with.

First consider that the effort we ought to put into any problem is not dependent just on how much it influences our lives -- how much better life would be if we solved it. It also depends on our chances of solving it, of seeing a path from here to there.

We took the comparatively easy step (a large piece of this in the 1950s and 1960s) of removing legal discrimination based on race. Governments can't explicitly bar black people from anything. Recent trends in voter suppression are worrisome but not explicitly racist. We can and should target specific things like police treating black suspects worse, where political conditions allow.

But a great deal of what remains is a matter of changing hearts and minds. This is hard work. Consciousness of Black oppression has awakened a parallel and opposite movement -- race consciousness on the part of Whites, who believe that they are the ones being discriminated against. I have trouble seeing a way around this disparity of views based on appealing to people's sense of compassion and fairness. Personally, I think this white race consciousness is factually and morally wrong, but that's not what matters for judging the chances of progress. To solve a problem, you need to see an end-to-end solution. More and more liberal whites sharing a deepened commitment to ending racism seems like one step, but as long as the next step is blocked, it's not productive towards solving that problem.

So how do you combat racism? How do you combat discrimination against any one group once you have eliminated legalized discrimination? I'm on shaky ground here, but I'd suggest the remedy that has worked best is to be quiet, work hard, and be patient. That's how people of Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Chinese heritage have gone from being despised minorities to being accepted groups within American society. Are readers aware of other, more active measures that were behind those achievements?

The initial situation of Blacks is worse; I can easily see that. This may arouse the indignation of a somewhat broader slice of the White population, but still a definite minority and not enough to lead to fundamental change. No matter how much justice may support a plaintive cry of, "It's not fair!" it does not lead to positive change unless it can get the support of a political majority.

Should the consequence of this unfairness be to tar America as evil? In practical terms, this is a spectacularly effective way to lose support.

I would suggest that discrimination has always been with us. Short people have it worse than tall people, through no fault of their own. Ugly people have it worse than attractive people. Dumb people have it worse than smart people. People with any of a variety of disabilities have it worse than those who are not disabled. None of these things is fair. But we live with them. The unfairness does not lead us to judge our society as fundamentally wrong. Blacks have it worse than Whites, and that is fundamentally unfair. Why should that unfairness lead to tagging our society as evil in a way that the others do not?

I can foresee a variety of attacks on my position. I have White Privilege, what I say perpetuates my privilege, so there is no need to even listen to the content of what I say. That entire framework is flawed and should be rejected, but that's a topic for another day. But you don't need a privilege framework to see me as someone who is not suffering saying it is OK for other people to suffer. True, but any argument should be judged on its own merits, not the qualities of the person making it. Consider that while those on the lucky side of the other unfairnesses (height, beauty, etc.) may not explicitly say that it is OK that the less fortunate endure unfairness, their silence and inaction have the same effect.

To summarize, I am trying to make two points: One is that the way to make progress on discrimination against a group is not to argue for it loudly. The other is that we can be reasonably content living in a society with discrimination of various kinds -- we always have and always will.

The usual call and response of a political rally is roughly... "What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!" I saw a cartoon many years ago that captured my position on this sort of issue: "What do we want? Incremental improvement! When do we want it? In a reasonable time frame!"

Saying America Has a Racist Past is Unhelpful

 

From the Woke Left, it is solemnly intoned as truth: America is a racist society, built on the exploitation of Native Americans and Blacks. It is rotten to the core, and only if the country as a whole joins together and implements profound changes could we begin to atone for our wretched past.

The right argues this is not true! American is not a racist society.

The important question is not whether this is true (there is a lot of truth to it) but whether to say it and when.

Part of what people learn when growing up is to choose what to say not based entirely on whether it is true but whether it is helpful. When introduced to a new person, you don't say, "You sure are ugly! And stupid too!" Even if they are clearly true.

Saying America is racist is emphasizing one aspect of history but totally ignoring another. A key question is how America compares to other countries. While we were being racist, what were others doing? Britain? France? Spain? China? Japan? Germany? Perhaps there are countries that did relatively little recent exploitation, but if so it was because they simply did not assume a large role on the world stage.

I am opposed to a curriculum that makes America's history of racism central. Probably the Right goes too far in trying to legislate it away, but it is still a very bad idea. I would rather frame US history by saying, "When people of any nation look back through history, they will see things their country did that were wrong, especially when judged by modern standards. Wherever they live, most people love their country despite past faults. It is a natural human tendency. It contributes to a nation working well and to the happiness of the citizens. America is no different. We have done things that are wrong, especially when judged by our standards of today. But we have also done a great deal that was right."

The map of Europe is the result of waves of ethnic cleansing. Four hundred years ago it was commonplace for Protestants to burn Catholics at the stake and vice versa. Every European nation that colonized the lands of people they thought of as "savages" did them grievous harm. The long history of China is one of cruelty. If a long history of atrocious criminal behavior is not documented for certain areas of the world, it is only because it was not written down.

People want to love their country, and Americans are no exception. Many have forebears who died fighting for it, and relatives who are signed up today to do so if necessary. As one small example of their affection, they want to root for our teams at the Olympics. Could those who feel our present is the rotten fruit of a racist past root for America at the Olympics? It's hard to see how if they are true to their beliefs.

There is a longstanding view in America that we are exceptional -- better than other lands. The Woke Left now wants us to believe we are exceptionally bad -- apparently worse than other nations. If they do think other nations are as bad or worse, they certainly don't emphasize it.

A great way to turn people away from progressive ideas is to emphasize the faults of America's past. Yes, we do have a racist past, but it is no help to put this front and center.

To what extent we have a racist present, and how best to present that if your goal is to reduce racism, is a topic for another day.

Beyond earth's orbit -- going to the moon and Mars

The Soviets earned the awe of the world in 1957 when they put the first artificial satellite into orbit, Sputnik. This was quite the PR coup, and was one of the motivators for the US national alarm about our lagging scientific expertise compared to the Soviet Union. That was probably a good thing for the US (investment in human infrastructure, we might call it today) -- there was a name for this US response but I can't remember what it was. But as I understand it, the Soviet coup wasn't due to greater knowledge, it was that the US military didn't think it was a priority. For the Soviets the ICBM was the first way to threaten the US homeland with nuclear attack (a rocket that can put a satellite in orbit can with a bit less power land a nuclear warhead anywhere on earth). The US already had ample ways of threatening the USSR from a variety of bomber bases right next to the USSR. In terms of the PR coup, what I've heard is that basically the US was asleep at the wheel and wasn't thinking along those lines. Of course the US took up the challenge, including Kennedy's promise to put a man on the moon, and we met that goal. That was our PR coup.

I don't recall any debate on whether we should go to the moon. The one snippet I have for an "anti" view was from Tom Lehrer. On one of his albums he notes that the US space program "will make it possible to spend $20 billion of your money to put some clown on the moon". Tom Lehrer was insightful about many things, but it seems he missed the boat on that one. I think most Americans thought it was $20 billion well spent, and much of the world population agreed. Pictures of the earth from the moon were valuable, and as a major human accomplishment it seemed to resonate with lots of people. I believe those 30-odd men from Apollo missions are the only humans who have ever gone more than a paltry 300 miles above the surface of the earth. Yet it didn't lead to much. I am reminded a bit of the dog who chases a car. The car pulls over, he's "caught" the car -- but now he doesn't know what to do with it. The moon is basically a big rock and there isn't much to do there. No one has gone back since Apollo ended, not because there are serious technical obstacles, but because there's not really any point.

Aside from the Apollo missions, human forays beyond earth have included a great many robotic probes. They explore various places in our solar system, and they convey valuable information back to us at relatively little cost. Getting humans to these places would be enormously expensive, especially as we need a return trip to bring them home safely. Our robotic craft are now far more capable than they were in the 1960s when the humans landing on the moon could gather some information better than robots.

We humans have for some years maintained the continuously-manned international space station, in low orbit around the earth. It is interesting for studying how things work in prolonged weightlessness, but I haven't heard of any truly astonishing discoveries that have resulted. Only 250 miles above the earth, it requires frequent rocket arrivals from earth to keep it going. It would be interesting to know how many earthlings know it is there, and of those that do, how often they think about it.

But what are the prospects for sending more humans beyond near-earth orbit?

There are a fair number of smart people who have in mind the idea of space colonization -- that humanity will spread throughout the galaxy. To a lot of other smart people (and me) this seems crazy. 

On earth, exponential growth allows organism to grow from small beginnings to occupy large areas. The space-colonization enthusiasts see humans doing this from star to star throughout the galaxy. Spreading humanity among the stars requires a great many planets to support the sort of economy we have on earth, using native materials to build more huge spacecraft, for instance. That is what would be required to let human expansion grow exponentially. We know there is no environment in the solar system that could possibly support that.

The nearest remotely suitable star is Alpha Centauri. There is no reason to think there is anything remotely habitable in that particular star system, let alone anything that would support a vibrant civilization. The requirements of a world that supports life in some form are far more lenient than a world that could support vibrant, flourishing human life. And to top off the list of problems, such worlds might already be full of other kinds of intelligent, vibrant, flourishing life that would not take kindly to human efforts to appropriate their world.

What about the more modest goal of just getting humans to another star? The obstacles are enormous. I found this brief write-up <rather amusing> (maybe I just have a quirky sense of humor). 

Within the solar system, all space missions we can imagine require transferring enormous resources from earth to support the endeavor. We probably could set up a permanently inhabited station on the moon, but the rocket trips up there to support it would be unending.

A human trip to Mars isn't out of the question. It "only" takes 9 months to get there, given rockets we know how to make. 

A permanent station on Mars is also a possibility, but once again the rocket trips to support it continuously are unending.

But these aren't just pipe dreams. Serious people in government bureaucracies seem to have <plans for this>.

Are these government pronouncements part of a calculation to support space budgets, figuring that popular support can be marshaled for programs with the human touch of sending humans? Does it lift human spirits to think we'll get to it "some day" even if never happens? Does it connect in people's minds to that goal of human colonization of space, however unfeasible in sober, practical terms?

For me, I'd say we made the point that it's possible to send humans from earth to other heavenly bodies back in 1969. We proved a point. From now on let's have the robots roam the solar system and beyond, and keep humans right here on earth.

<This XKCD> stayed with me. If you stop thinking astronomically, trapped on the surface of a sphere isn't a bad place to be.

wage magnification

Wage magnification is a form of redistribution from rich to poor. I may have alluded to it in previous posts, but here I focus on it (and just imagine a blog author writing about the same thing twice - unheard of!)

Suppose your minimum wage is the (quite low) figure of $5 an hour. The government ponies up directly, into the worker's paycheck, $7 an hour to give them a wage of $12 an hour. If the job pays $10 an hour, the government pays another $5 an hour to make it a $15 per hour job. Perhaps it would also turn a $15 an hour job into an $18 an hour job, the magnification rather quickly falling off to zero as the rate of pay goes up.

A key premise is that people like to feel useful, and for many of them this involves work. As with ordinary work today, with wage magnification the more they work, the more they earn. If they get a job that pays a bit better, then they earn a bit more. This means that people are rewarded in accord with their effort and performance -- they have control.

It compares favorably with a minimum wage for a couple reasons. One is that the minimum wage is paid by the employer, and creates an incentive for them to cut jobs and hours. (Compared to the world as it is now, raising minimum wage is a good idea, but I propose that wage magnification would be even better). In contrast to a minimum wage, wage magnification is paid by the government. If employers have useful work to be done for even $5 an hour, they can hire people to do it, and the incentive for labor-saving technologies and procedures is much less. The work gets done, it is truly useful work, and they feel good about doing it. Another problem with a minimum wage is a sort of "floor effect". You imagine that a whole lot of jobs that would otherwise pay varying amounts less than the minimum wage will all get paid at that rate, so finding a more responsible job would at the low end of the scale not be rewarded with more money.

A guaranteed basic income is a decent idea, but it very much removes any incentive. You get the money no matter what you do, which once again removes control over that aspect of your earnings.

An example of wage magnification that is already in place is the earned income credit. It is very limited, and its effect is delayed, visible only after you file your taxes for the year. And it is tied to your overall financial situation.

Wage magnification could be made simple to administer. You don't look at someone's overall financial situation, the magnification just happens in the paycheck.

By improving people's incomes, wage magnification should reduce somewhat the need for other social programs. At that level of pay, people spend most of their income, improving the economy.

In tax policy, we need a place to look very carefully at someone's overall financial situation and make our taxes progressive, and we have it today in two places: the income tax and the inheritance tax. That is where we tax the rich more heavily (and could do so more effectively by closing loopholes). It is unnecessary complexity and overhead to do "means testing" in other programs, though there is a natural political pressure against giving things to the wealthy.

There are plenty of other ways we could make things fairer by reducing regressive taxes -- eliminating sales tax would be one. No longer making prisoners and criminal suspects pay hefty fees is another.

We also have in place a variety of other programs to help the less-well-off, and I am not proposing replacing them, such as disability insurance, Medicaid, Social Security and Medicare. Universal health insurance is a good idea. Credits for help in raising children also seem like a good idea. What wage magnification competes with most directly is the minimum wage, which could be kept low or possibly even lowered.

 

God Still Doesn't Exist

 

I argued in <this post> that God doesn't exist. I was recently looking at some Wikipedia entries on the existence of God, and had a few more thoughts to share.

The starting position of other atheists should be that there is no God, and it is the obligation of the theist to tell us about a God and some of its properties and give evidence for its existence. The burden of proof is on them. There are some "strong" atheists who argue how there couldn't possibly be a God where the burden of proof is reversed, but that is not a position I care to defend. But many atheists enter the debate as if they were on equal footing. Socially and politically, this is true, since lots of human beliefs and human institutions are based on religion. But logically, it is not true. The atheist seeking truth can sweep aside culture and require that theists start from zero and tell us about their God.

Theists don't want just any God, they want a personal God who cares about us and our concerns and is to a considerable extent knowable by us. "God exists, therefore Lutheranism is the one true faith!" is I hope a joke, as there is quite a large gap in the reasoning there.

Suppose you accept that there must be a first cause to the universe, and therefore God must exist. We would have no reason to think that this God has anything to do with humanity. Certainly if you think God is the cause of the Big Bang, which formed billions of galaxies, numbers alone suggest that we don't have much of God's attention, if indeed he was inclined to care about any entities like us at all.

I argued before for why <personal experience was a poor reason to believe in God>.

Another sort of argument is that humans have a universal tendency to believe in God, that there is a "God-shaped hole" in every person. It should instead be called a "belief-in-God shaped hole". We have a great many tendencies that are common but false. See for instance some <cognitive distortions>.

Another argument is that religion is helpful. It has led to people doing good works, and it may be correlated with happiness, notably in today's USA. Many things that are useful are not true. For instance, a belief by young children that their parents' beliefs are correct might be one -- true or not, the parents' beliefs got them far enough to have children. Another might be the belief that one's own country or people is greater or better than all the others. This is usually useful to one's own people. Whether it leads to greater overall total happiness is debatable but not clearly false. If you think of competing companies in a given field, employee belief that their company is best might lead to harder work in all such companies and an overall better result for society as they compete.

You can approach life from many perspectives. The one I favor most often is, "However inconvenient or depressing it may be, what is true?" But there are others. One is something like, "let's find common ground and try to get along with each other." It's not a bad idea. I am what I call a "friendly atheist", because I don't feel the need to twist people's arms to make them give up their religion and see the truth of atheism. If their religion gives them a comfortable place to live and does no harm, why rock the boat? I draw the line at religions that constrain the lives of other people. Theocracies are an obvious example. If one can deter such believers at all, it should be sufficient for them to ask if their conception of God is so obviously correct that they should constrain the behavior of other believers who share most of their beliefs. There is no need to get them to consider becoming atheists, which would likely be a far more radical change for them.

With truth in mind, a quip comes to my mind... "The existence of God is fake news." Of course it trivializes a long-standing and important question, but it's also an honest reaction of an atheist, where an old truth can be expressed in a new metaphor.

Another snarky internal reaction I sometimes have to a statement about God is, "Who?" This reflects the idea that the burden of proof is on the theist, and until proven otherwise God is a fiction. Also, there are so many different conceptions of God I don't even know which fiction the speaker is professing to believe in.