The Nuclear Alert System

Blogged about the problem of the false alert in Hawaii the other day.  Kottke has a post showing the actual screen the operator was faced with, and a discussion of some of the issues. I'm stealing the image from him:



This is obviously terrible system design.  What interests me is the haphazard combination of situations.  What I'd guess has happened is someone came up with a state/county alert system, and situations have been added to it.  What's striking is the variety of organizations which can trigger an alert: police can trigger an AmberAlert, weather bureau can generate high surf, USGS can issue the tsunanmi warning, etc.   So there seem to be a bunch of inputs to the one person who then makes the selection, each selection presumably with a different set of addressees and a preset canned message.

I wonder what happens when the person is away from her desk, in the bathroom, on leave, etc.  I have a hard time believing that the desk is manned/womanned 24 hours a day with no lapses. 

What's the Meaning of Trade Hypocrisy

From a Post piece by Roger Lowenstein reviewing trade policy:

Trump is scarcely the first president to resort to tariffs. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama regrettably succumbed — but muted their overall effect by simultaneously pursuing trade pacts. Reagan talked free trade but — in the midst of a severe recession — protected American autos, steel and semiconductors.

Why, oh why do we elect hypocrites to the Presidency?  Why can't we elect single-minded straight forward types, who believe in one policy and act accordingly, rather than wavering back and forth like Obama and Bush and even Reagan?

My answer is it's the art of politics, trying to maintain majority support by tacking back and forth to convince people you respect their concerns and listen.  In other words, hypocrisy in a politician is good.

Molly Bloom

I seem to be falling into a pattern of short movie reviews, given my wife and I are regularly seeing movies since the holidays.  Today was "Molly Bloom", with good performances by Jessica Chastain and Idris Elba, written and directed by Aaron Sorkin.  With that talent it's a good movie, not great. Part of the problem is the male-female dynamic: Bloom fights to gain a position, and is beaten down by men, three times.  She loses her first game, she's beaten up for refusing to cooperate with Russian gangsters in laundering money, and she's arrested by FBI and has her money confiscated.  Finally her dad shows up and explains her psychology based on family trauma.  So the "arc" (any reviewer has to discuss a character's arc or have the reviewer license taken away) is failure leads to self-knowledge. 

Bottom line: it's worth seeing.

Times Changes: Veterans and Non-veterans

I was alerted to this by a blog I've lost track of, so I searched and found this.

It graphs the proportion of the male population who are veterans:

18-34 year olds:   3.48 percent

75 and older (me): 49.53 percent

You're Not Who You Were a Second Ago

Been reading Jennifer Doudna's Crack in Creation.  She's one of the scientists involved in the creation and development of CRISPR, the tool used to edit DNA without importing genes from other species. 

Towards the end she has this sentence: "Every person experience roughly one million mutations per second..."  If I understood her book, there's a natural process to correct those mutations, a process which CRISPR adapts.

New Yorker and Small Farmers

The New Yorker has a piece on the 2018 farm bill and the plight of small farmers:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that, between 2013 and 2016, net farm income fell by half, the largest three-year drop since the Great Depression. Some forty-two thousand farms folded during the downturn, and small and medium-sized operations, such as the Fitches’ [upstate dairy farm serving as the hook for the story], proved particularly vulnerable.

Not the First Time--an Exception

Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money links to a piece of his on the development of nuclear missile subs, triggered by problems India is having. 

"In retrospect, the George Washington class SSBNs were a fabulous engineering success, entering service quickly, with few problems, and packing a huge punch. All of the NATO boats were relatively quiet and could threaten the USSR from long-range. On the other hand, it took the USSR nearly a decade to produce a meaningful deterrent boat. It has taken China nearly three decades, despite extensive experience in both countries in submarine construction and operation."

He omits the credit due one of the greatest bureaucrats we have ever produced: Admiral Hyman Rickover.   So an exception to my "Harshaw rule" (you never do things right the first time): "unless you're Hyman Rickover"

It Was a Different Century: 1998

"” It took three weeks of lobbying the top editors of the Washington Post to get me access to the internet."

Susan Glasser recalling the time when the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal became public, as part of an interesting dialog with Isikoff, Baker, and Harris (if you don't recognize the reporters you weren't around in 1998.)

France and EU Farm Subsidies

It seems French farmers may be losing out according to this Politico piece,  The dynamics of the French farm programs are similar to the U.S:

With defense, security, migration and digital technology emerging as clear strategic priorities for Brussels, it is becoming increasingly difficult to defend the sacrosanct status afforded to farmers, particularly the bigger landowners. Under the current budget, a massive €58 billion a year, or some 40 percent of the EU budget, goes to CAP payments, but 80 percent of that money heads to only 20 percent of farms.

I Was Wrong About Trump's Wall

I would have sworn he promised to build a wall along the entire border, but from this NYTimes summary he's been pretty consistent in specifying 1,000 miles.