Author Archives: eehines

A Glittering Generality

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This one is from Republican candidate for Ohio Governor, Vivek Ramaswamy:

Instead of viewing AI as competition, the next generation should own a stake in improving America’s economic productivity. If every child has $10,000 invested in the S&P 500, every one of them would be a millionaire well before retirement.

From where would that initial $10k stake come? If it’s handed to “every child” from outside (vis., government), that child would have no skin in that game, and he would not find himself at pains to protect that stake by actively participating in improving our economic productivity—for instance, by getting a job and working to his employer’s goals or starting his own business and working to make it grow and prosper. The money would just be found money of no personal value.

On top of that, Ramaswamy did not address another aspect of this “plan:” what does he think the value would be of those millions of dollars in the child’s end game of retirement after a long and fruitful life of doing…something? An increase of all that nominal wealth without a concomitant increase in the supply of goods and services, will simply drive up the cost of those goods and services, which is otherwise known as inflation. Those millions of dollars may well wind up with the purchasing value of today’s thousands of dollars.

This is a plan that sounds good in its base outline, but it badly wants cold, clear-eyed fleshing out with facts; hard logic; and clear, publicly measurable steps to be taken. Especially, but not exclusively, the steps needed to keep productivity growth up with S&P 500 growth in an environment where today’s and lots of prior year’s S&P 500 growth—its price to earnings ratio—has been outstripping goods and services—productivity–growth.

Part of the Problem

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The Department of Defense, first under the Biden administration, but continuing under the Trump administration, is having far too much trouble deploying “AI weapons,” even figuring out how to use those it has deployed. An illustration of this is this:

The Pentagon has also struggled to find software that can successfully control large numbers of drones, made by different companies, working in coordination to find and potentially strike a target—a key to making the Replicator vision work.

This isn’t so much a software commonality or interoperability problem as it is a problem with bureaucrats giving too much weight to the desires of contractors and their lobbyists, each of whom insist on their own proprietary software. What’s needed here isn’t more money (although sometimes that helps), it’s an operational officer, one fresh in from a combatant command that’s facing current conflicts, being put in charge of AI development and programs. This officer, independent of the lobbyists, needs to write a better requirements document, one that specifies the standards of commonality (not merely interoperability—this is software, not hardware) that each contractor and contractor wannabe must meet in order for their AI package to be considered.

Beyond that, this AI OIC must open his Requests for Proposals far beyond the major contractors and take in RFPs from small businesses and startups—that’s where the ideas and agility exist—then push the development and acquisition pace, eliminating the layers of bureaucrats’ reviews.

Finally, this AI OIC must be willing to spend money on mistakes and dead ends rather than demanding (near) perfection at one stage before moving on to the next.

That’s just the development side. The AI OIC also must have four or five teams of operational officers—again, fresh in from combatant commands—working on tactics and strategies that make use of the four or five leading AI weapons candidates to investigate best uses for integrating these weapons into a combatant command unit’s (at all levels) existing suite of weapons. That tactics and strategies development effort should also lead to adjustments in those units’ existing tactics and those commands’ existing strategies, even their existing suites of weapons.

There’re just too much bureaucracy and too little operational consideration in the currently extant DoD. SecDef is making progress on the bureaucracy qua bureaucracy, but he’s got a long way to go. It’s time for him to zero in on lethality.

Should We Forgive Barry Bonds?

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That’s the lead-off question The Free Press asked in its Wednesday piece. The article then just beat around the bush on the matter while spilling endless pixels on the marketability of Bonds memorabilia and those of other disgraced baseball players, and on other baseball players alleged (with greater or lesser amounts of supporting data) to have cheated. But Bonds did cheat—he used performance enhancing drugs.

So: should we forgive Barry Bonds? Of course; we should have done so a long time ago. But that doesn’t mean we should forget his cheating. That cheating was of a magnitude—increasing, for instance the number of hits and the number of homeruns he would have gotten absence his PED use—that he has been, and rightly should continue to be, barred from baseball’s Hall of Fame. The stats he accrued from his PED use overshadowed other, honest, players and deprived them of their leading stats.

That some other players similarly cheated, or seriously violated other baseball rules (viz., betting on baseball games) in no way absolves Bonds. The existence of those other cheats and baseball’s spotty record regarding them only point up baseball’s atrociously inconsistent enforcement of its own rules.

And: just to drive home the point, forgiving is not the same as forgetting, and it’s long past time to stop conflating the two.

A Mistake

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DHS, according to Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, is looking at so-called “ICE tracking apps,” which allow users to share locations of immigration enforcement activity in real time. Of course they should be looking at these.

However.

According to McLaughlin, while such apps might currently be legal, they are “being used by gangs, suspected terrorists, and others to evade law enforcement and even target officers.”
She said the Department of Justice might consider whether the apps and other tracking tools amount to obstruction of justice.

That’s looking at the wrong end of the apps. It’s certainly true that, as McLaughlin also says, there has been a 1,000% increase in assaults against ICE officers.

But the way to deal with that is not to go after the apps as obstructions of justice. The proper way to deal with that is to treat the use of the apps in particular ways as obstructions of justice, backtrack those uses to their users, and then to go after the users who actually obstruct justice or who interfere with law enforcement officers in the course of their actions.

The apps themselves are merely tools. They’re agnostic in themselves; it’s the users who are…not agnostic.

Moreover, targeting the apps over their misuse also would fuel the Left’s war on our 2nd Amendment, making it easier to target our weapons over their misuse.

US Naval Academy Midshipman Honor Concept and Mikie Shirrell

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New Jersey’s Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Governor, it turns out, was barred from walking with her Naval Academy class during its graduation ceremony, although she was allowed to graduate and be commissioned into our Navy. Her explanation for this is this:

I didn’t turn in some of my classmates, so I didn’t walk….

What she didn’t turn some of her classmates in over was a cheating scandal that impacted 130 midshipmen in her class.

And she’s proud of that refusal.

This is the Naval Academy’s Honor Concept [boldface in the original, italic emphasis added]:

Midshipmen are persons of integrity: They stand for that which is right.
They tell the truth and ensure that the truth is known.
They do not lie.

They embrace fairness in all actions. They ensure that work submitted as their own is their own, and that assistance received from any source is authorized and properly documented.
They do not cheat.

They respect the property of others and ensure that others are able to benefit from the use of their own property.
They do not steal.

By refusing to turn in those classmates about whom she knew, by refusing to testify over the course of the cheating investigation, Sherrill openly lied by omission. She further lied by tacitly obstructing that investigation. She affirmatively prevented the truth from being known.

This is the concept of honor and integrity that Mikie Sherrill is putting on offer for the good citizens of New Jersey. It seems a poor fit for any Governor’s office.