Engineers and Lawyers
I am reading this interview of Dan Wang by Russ Douthat of the New York Times and find it fascinating how Wang describes the difference between China in terms of engineers and lawyers. Wang says the current China is founded by engineers, who in my experience put great value on efficiency. I think Elon Musk’s DODGE was/is very much a rise of engineers in the United States who believe they know better about running a country than lawyers. Whenever you have a group of people who are dominated by ego to think they alone are the smart people and therefore know all the answers to all the problems, you have a high potential for tyranny. Democracy and liberty is not about efficiency, it’s about peaceful co-existence. If one insists upon efficiency you end up being like the other countries, such as the old USSR and China, who likewise make efficiency a prime directive.
Here is the money quote of Dan Wang in the article:
The game goes to he who outlasts the adversary. But what the Chinese want to do is to just keep things really, really stable and just wait for the Western countries to collapse.
China plays the long game while the U.S. plays the short game.
Remember the trope, you can’t shout fire in a crowded movie theatre? The trope is intended to convey the limits of free speech, but it also conveys the extent of free speech. Perhaps one of the reasons why I remember this trope is because of it’s roots in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, my home land.
If you believe that capitalism depends upon a free market that depends upon democracy to exist, then it seems to me that the U.S. Executive successfully threatening a U.S. corporation that results in that corporation meeting the Executive’s demands is clear evidence the U.S. is now an illiberal democracy. Corporations are the prime entities of capitalism that has wealth as it’s prime directive, not liberty, so they are not going to stand up to the Executive. And here is the kicker… given that most American’s retirement savings is tied to capitalism via corporate stock, it can be argued their actions are in the best interests of the citizens. The affect is trading liberty for wealth and security.
Yesterday I reached the half way point of my virtual walk of the 2,650 mile Pacific Crest Trail that I started on December 18, 2024. I am using the Walk The Distance app.
The Chicago Cubs have clinched a Wild Card spot in the playoffs, what remains is to determine whether they have home field for the three game Wild Card series that will be in October. My buddy who is a fellow Cubs fan doubts the Cubs will have success in the playoffs. I see no reason why they can’t win a three game series at Wrigley, however I think what is most important is that the young Cubs players gain playoff experience. How well the Cubs will do depends on how well they play during the next two weeks. In recent years the best MLB teams haven’t won the World Series, it’s been the hottest teams.
Democracy is thought of as a weakness when the prime directive changes from liberty to power. If the goal is to power over others, which by the way has been a key means to the American way of life since World War II, the most efficient means to that goal is dictatorship.
Will WordLand Be A Posting Switchboard?
I listened to Dave’s podcast in which he starts to describe what he is doing with WordLand and FeedLand, and that sounds a lot like what I said that I want in practically my first post on micro.blog. Right now I am writing this using Drummer and it will be published to my Daynotes blog. If I want to also publish this on my micro.blog I need to copy and paste it in to another outline from which posts to micro.blog are published.
Copy and paste is a lot of work, what if for every post I could specify which publishing destination that post goes to simply by selecting the destination locations via a checkbox? What if I could later add a destination by simply going back to that post and checking another box, or clear a checkbox and it is removed. When I edit the item the changes are automatically re-published. BTW, the last item probably won’t work to social network destinations because they generally don’t allow editing.
The key is the per item control over the publishing destination and continual ability to edit the item. For now micro.blog’s ability to cross post items I publish to it to Mastodon and Bluesky come closest to my vision, but that is not on a per post basis, it’s all items published to my micro.blog that are published to those other destinations.
Two windows on the iPad Mini running iPad OS 26. I’ve been using the Microsoft Duo to monitor my two fantasy football teams on game days because I can see the two apps side by side. This arrangement on the iPad Mini might be as useful.
Accidental Middle Class
A question came to mind last night. Was the middle class in the United States intentionally created or simply the happy result of the post World War 2 reconstruction? I was raised in what I consider to be middle class and as Gen X I was taught how good the middle class was, but for all its importance I don’t think it was something intentionally created.
A problem today in the United States is that the middle class is eroding, and I think that is because it was never really intended to exist and thus there has been no real effort to retain it. The middle class is a target of our politics but not our policies.
I think the destruction of the middle class matters because it provides for two important societal concepts. One is the idea of enough, but which I mean having the means for a good life. The second is a reason for hope that one can have as good a life as their parents if not better. An important corollary to the idea of enough is that one does not have to be the wealthiest person in terms of money to have a good life.
Without realistic hope of a good life, everything feels pointless to the point that life doesn’t matter. If then in a search for an answer to why one’s life is pointless a person becomes convinced it is because of the other now there is a target for their rage that is amplified by the Internet.
Liberty Is The Prime Directive
Yesterday I wrote that I think we need to have serious discussion about what is liberty, and here is what I mean. I believe the fundamental purpose of the U.S. Constitution and thus the fundamental purpose of all branches of the Federal government, and in particular the Supreme Court is to preserve liberty.
For liberty to be preserved there needs to be agreement on how liberty is preserved, what conditions must exist or how to we determine there is liberty. For example, I think individual privacy is required for liberty to exist and I think personal autonomy (control over one’s body) is required for liberty to exist. Neither privacy or autonomy are enumerated in the Constitution, but amendments such as the fourth amendment function in maintaining privacy and autonomy. Furthermore, liberty cannot exist in a country where people are at risk of being killed, so viewing the second amendment in the context of preserving liberty also means the government has the obligation to create and enforce laws about weapons.