One Additional Aspect

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The Supreme Court is taking up the case of Suncor Energy v Boulder County, which as the WSJ editors put it, asks whether state and local governments may use state tort laws to impose liability on American companies for the effects of global climate change.

The editors pointed out a number of reasons why the Boulder County effort to punish fossil fuel companies nationwide for global outcomes from a global range of putative sources should fail, including this one:

From the beginning, the Constitution was designed to ensure that the US would speak with one voice in its dealings abroad. States may not conduct their own foreign relations or establish competing national policies toward other countries. The Supreme Court has repeatedly enforced that principle, recognizing that federal authority in matters affecting foreign relations must be free from local interference.

There’s an additional aspect to this argument. One of the reasons for the Constitutional Convention was to correct the several ills and weaknesses in our Articles of Confederation, weaknesses that were verging on being fatal to our nascent nation. Under the Articles, the nominally central government could not speak for the nation on matters of international import; each of the 13 States of the Confederation could speak for itself on the global stage. Those 14 voices, usually in as much conflict with each other as with foreign nations, were tearing the Confederation apart if not exposing it to outright conquering by a still hostile Great Britain, a newly (overtly) hostile France, and an antipathetic Dutch Republic.

Our Constitution fixed that failure by seating foreign policy firmly in the hands of the Federal government, to be executed by the government’s chief executive, the President. States no longer had any say on foreign policy, other than via Representatives and Senators in Congress.

Costs and Aggregated Statistics

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A Just the News news writer wrote that [p]ositive US economic indicators have been left out of much of the mainstream media’s reporting on the state of the economy.

He’s right—the mainstream media really is that mendaciously biased. His claim, though, also is wholly irrelevant in the present election season.

All those economically favorable data that the news media studiously ignores are aggregated data; they refer to the nation and not to any particular individual, not even to any small groups of people in local communities.

Folks don’t care that, as a nation, inflation is down sharply from the Biden years or the nation’s median household income has risen to nearly $87,500. Who is this Mr/Ms Median Household person, anyway? Has anyone actually met him or her? Nor do folks care that the nation‘s jobs data are favorable.

What an individual—a voter—cares about is that he’s personally paying gas prices that are up 30-40 percent over the pre-Biden years; he, the trucker, is personally paying diesel prices that are up nearly double; her grocery bills at the local grocery store are up 40-50 percent; his/her income—what he or she gets in an actual take home paycheck—doesn’t stretch to pay those higher costs. It’s not that he notices that his take home pay isn’t growing enough to keep up with inflation—generally he doesn’t. Nor does he need to, what he sees is that his paycheck no longer covers his gas, groceries, utility bills, and on and on. That’s if the individual has a job at all, which personal datum is invisible in those aggregated statistics. He’s just a depersoned number in the collection of labor statistics.

What are politicians, especially Republican politicians, going to do about that? This is what, so far.

Republicans are going to be swept into oblivion next month if they don’t stop hiding under their desks avoiding these simple facts and get out among their constituents—diners, rec centers, town halls, letters to local editors, interviews on local television and radio stations—and say, in so many words, what their particular policies are that will address their constituents’ particular cost of living concerns.

Being specific is the bane of politicians, exposing them as specifics do, to broad criticism and sharp opprobrium. It’s time now, though, for Republicans to find some backbone and be specific, which, as a happy side effect, would let them point out the failure of their opponents to have any sort of plan for these ills other than that they’re not Trump and they’re not Republicans.

What’s In A Name?

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Lately, cutesy names seem to have become more important than the work being done under those labels. “Digital ninja.” “Storyteller.” (At least today’s cutesy pluses up the work. Yesterday’s cutesy deprecated it: “Guy that operates the other seat’s equipment.” “Guy in back.”)

Now we’re getting “marketing engineer” in the world of AI. James Cadwallader, Co-Founder of Profound:

This person is going to be part builder—meaning they’re able to understand this technology and build and deploy and tinker with these agents—but part marketer, in that they’re very human and they have good taste and judgment[.]

So do used car salesmen need to understand their product and display taste and judgment. And salesmen and -women in any department store. No one there, though, dilutes the useful meaning of “engineer”—a person who actually designs and then carries out the execution of some thing—by attaching it to a job title.

So, what’s in a name? In this case, not much. A marketer is still a salesman, no matter his title. How he smells depends on what he does, too, not how he’s called.

Own the work, my man, and let the names and titles fall where they may.

A Nadir and a One-Two Punch

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SecDef Pete Hegseth spoke to his troops the other day, and the WSJ‘s editors remarked on it at some length. Among their remarks was this, toward the end of their piece.

The US military is weathering a one-two punch: a major evolution in battlefield technology coinciding with a nadir in conventional forces as Reagan-era equipment retires. Meanwhile, the US must deter two nuclear peer adversaries (China and Russia) as well as deal with their lesser partners in Iran and North Korea.

One-two punches often precede a knockout blow and the end of a fight, or a nation (for an example of the latter, see Nazi Germany, the USSR, and Poland). The one the US faces, though, can work out extremely favorably for us.

Were our military flush while the technology rollover proceeds apace, political inertia, along with legally committed spending and longer term contracts would strongly militate [sic] against changing course and switching over to greater emphasis on those emerging technologies of immediate and longer-term use on the battlefield, in any upcoming war, and in diplomatic and military efforts to shape the battlefield and the post-battle diplomatic arena.

However, with our military at its current nadir and defense spending similarly reduced, a golden opportunity to shift our military equipage, manpower training, and our fighting (and diplomatic) tactics, strategy, and doctrine to better meet the developing current and future conflict environments has presented itself. With limited funding, there’s less inertia to continue business as usual in acquisition and training for our military components. The ability to shift to those more productive efforts is made commensurately easier.

The one-two punch that confronts us today truly is a crisis. The People’s Republic of China—one of those nuclear peer adversaries—understands the nature of crises: its word for the term is a two-ideogram construct consisting of the ideograms for Danger and Opportunity. The present one-two punch is one of those crises for us.

AI and Polling

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A letter-writer in Tuesday’s WSJ Letters section thinks he sees a use for AI in improving the quality of political polls, which for the last several years have been badly off the mark both in prediction election winners and in predicting the margins of victory when they did get the winner right.

He’s sort of right, and he’s wrong.

It [AI] can help researchers reach a more representative mix of people, examine results faster and track changes in opinion more often.

AI can certainly speed up “examinations” of results if it’s properly trained on truly balanced techniques. That, though, requires humans being diligent about scrubbing as much as possible their own biases, with those humans involved in the training coming from a variety of political bents so as to counterbalance remaining biases. This is a requirement too often honored in the lack.

Additionally, researchers already know how to reach a more representative sample. However, they’ve been, instead, deliberately oversampling one party over others in order to reach a predetermined outcome. AI will not address that; it cannot correct it if it could address it.

Finally, there’s not much need to track opinion changes more frequently than is already done; most of us already have polling fatigue and are not interested in being confronted by even more polls, even if we just decline to participate.

In the end, all AI is likely to do, at least until we get better trained human oversight, is speed up the rate at which the polls get the politics wrong.