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!