I have never read an editorial in which the editors of a major newspaper danced around an idea in such a determined fashion as this editorial from the Chicago Tribune. In the editorial, the editors clearly cannot bring themselves to recommend we vote for Don Tracy, the Republican challenger to Juliana Stratton for the seat in the U. S. Senate that Dick Durbin has held for nearly 30 years. Here’s their conclusion:

Stratton is to the far left of her party; Tracy is on the moderate wing of his. But by moderate wing, we don’t want to imply he’d be a Republican revolutionary. And, given where we are this moment, many will conclude that will just not be enough.

Their rationale is earlier in the editorial:

For many of our readers, the notion of flipping the venerable Dick Durbin’s seat in the United States Senate to a Republican at the very moment when Donald Trump has capriciously abandoned his support for the brave people of Ukraine and climbed into a diesel-filled waterbed with the dangerous Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, would be as irresponsible as it is unconscionable.

We more than sympathize.

The editors focus on the Senate seat as an instrument of national party politics. For me the more crucial question is how effectively will the next senator advance Illinois’s interests?

I wonder if the people of Illinois realize what’s about to happen to us and it will happen whoever we elect to the Senate. We are about to replace one of the most powerful figures in the Senate with a backbencher. Illinois is typically ignored by the national Democratic Party. Illinois is characterized as a “Blue State”, i.e. it is carried by the Democratic candidate in national elections. Illinois last voted for a Republican presidential candidate in 1988. We are taken for granted. That will be even more the case when Stratton succeeds Durbin.

I have just learned that a very old friend has died. How old? I have known him for almost 70 years, since he was a small child. I babysat for him, introduced him to reading, taught him to play the guitar, which he proceeded to make his life.

His wife died a little less than a year ago and he never really recovered. Rest in peace.

I wanted to remind readers of several things:

1. I support Ukraine in its struggle against Russia. I think Russia was wrong to invade Ukraine. Whatever legitimate grievances Russia had, they did not justify invading Ukraine.
2. From the very first day I opposed going to war with Iran. A casus belli does not impel one to go to war, especially without a coherent plan for achieving one’s objectives at a cost one is willing and able to bear.
3. I have opposed our assisting Saudi Arabia in its war against the Houthi. Simply stated, the Saudis are not our friends. What American interest justifies helping them prosecute this war? What are we supposed to accomplish, and why should we expect our assistance to accomplish it?

I do have some things to add to those. Despite believing we should continue to support Ukraine, I don’t think we should have any illusions about Ukraine. The Russo-Ukrainian War is not the good guys fighting the bad guys. We shouldn’t idealize Ukraine.

I am constantly surprised at how poorly President Trump understands the oil market. Self-sufficient or not, there is a global market for oil and that continues to affect us because we’re part of that global market. Does he genuinely believe that buying diesel from Russia will materially ease the price increases in the United States?

One thing I don’t believe I’ve mentioned before: the jinn is out of the bottle. The Iranians have demonstrated in practice that they can impede traffic in the Straits of Hormuz. Even if the war ended tomorrow, Iran will continue to be aware that they can create havoc in world oil markets by their ability to impede traffic in the Straits. That won’t go away.

Honoring the debt could destroy the political coalition necessary to govern France; defaulting could destroy the financial capacity needed to carry out its policies. Default, which is an actual possibility, would have strongly deleterious effects on German banks. There could well be a ripple effect in Europe.

France’s basic problem continues to be that its large public debt impedes its growth and its participation in the euro renders it unable to monetize its debt.

As I said before, all of this is primarily of concern to me because of the prospective impact on France’s defense posture.

I wanted to take note of something said by Dariush Mozaffarian in his recent Wall Street Journal op-ed:

Two people with the same age, sex, size, weight and activity level can burn substantially different numbers of calories depending on what they eat. Recent global studies show that differences in obesity rates between populations are explained less by varying physical activity than varying resting metabolic rate. Analyses from the U.S. and U.K. find that the average energy we burn at rest has declined significantly over the past several decades.

Together, these discoveries help explain why decades of calorie-focused advice have failed to reverse the obesity epidemic: Calories represent arithmetic detached from biology.

None of this violates the laws of thermodynamics. Weight gain still reflects an imbalance between energy intake and energy expenditure. The mistake is assuming that calorie counts alone explain a process that is shaped by the microbiome, hormonal signaling, fat storage, muscle maintenance, thermogenesis and metabolism itself.

The emphasis is mine. How much of the differences among those factors is governed by behavior, how much by environment, and how much by genetics?

I think the honest answer is that we know these influences matter but we cannot reliably say how much each contributes to the differences he describes. Naming the biological mechanisms does not resolve that uncertainty.

There are several additional complexities. “The population” of the United States today is considerably different from what it was in 1980 and even more different from what it was in 1940. It also differs from the populations of Brazil, Germany, and China. How much of the reported variation reflects changes in diet and how much reflects differences in the populations being compared? I don’t think we can confidently say. Furthermore, does Dr. Mozaffarian think those differences matter only when it comes to diet? Why wouldn’t they matter in other aspects of health including responses to medications and other treatments? If they do, that raises questions about much of modern medicine as practiced in the United States. Population averages may be useful but applying them to an individual requires assumptions. If those assumptions warrant questioning in dietary advice, they warrant questioning elsewhere as well.

I was gratified to see that the editors of the New York Times had come around to the strategy I arrived at by inspection for managing whatever threats might be posed by artificial intelligence:

When companies create products that hurt people, the victims can sue. The legal system allows those who are harmed to seek compensation from those who are responsible. These liability laws are one of the oldest forms of corporate regulation, and an effective one. Liability is a powerful incentive to behave responsibly. It speaks to corporations in a language they understand: Money.

Artificial intelligence is an industry in need of incentives to behave responsibly, to judge by the litany of transgressions to which leading A.I. companies have confessed in recent months. Their programs have hacked or attempted to hack the databases of private companies and public institutions, including the governments of the United States and Australia.

This is a welcome addition:

Liability is an incomplete answer for the challenges posed by A.I., but it has two great advantages: The laws are on the books, and they are powerful. Makers of cars, airplanes, tobacco products and opioids have all been forced by lawsuits to change how they do business. They made their products safer, restricted access to them or both. Most recently, the social media company Meta agreed to pay billions of dollars to states and to start changing its policies toward children.

and

State legislatures have a role to play as well. They can write statutes to clarify the application of existing laws to A.I. Legislatures can also hold A.I. companies to a higher standard of accountability than current law does, given the risks. Companies are generally liable if a plaintiff can show that they knew or should have known about the danger their products posed. But some particularly dangerous activities, like storing toxic chemicals and operating a nuclear power plant, are held to a standard of strict liability, meaning that the company is responsible for harm even if it had no knowledge of the danger in advance.

The theory of strict liability is simple: If you own a tiger, and the animal bites a neighbor, the essential fact is that you own a dangerous wild animal. It doesn’t matter how cleverly the tiger was trained, or how carefully it was guarded. Bryan Choi, a law professor at the University of Colorado, notes that in the early days of aviation, lawmakers imposed this strict liability standard on the dangerous new technology. In the case of A.I., top executives themselves have spoken publicly about the dangers, up to the possibility of human extinction.

Some industry advocates argue that enforcing liability laws will stifle innovation, because A.I.’s defining breakthrough is its ability to act independently. Indeed, they argue that any significant restraints on A.I.’s development would be a mistake because the potential benefits of racing ahead are so great. In a recent interview, Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, said, “We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology.”

Yet other industries do not escape legal responsibility for their products in the name of innovation.

Strict liability is essential for LLM AI. Due to the very nature of the technology it shouldn’t be necessary to prove intent or negligence; only harm and causation. Those hurdles will be high enough. If a company deploys a system whose particular harmful behavior cannot reliably be anticipated even with reasonable care requiring victims to identify a negligent act can leave them bearing the costs of a commercial activity from which others profit. That is a substantive argument for strict liability, and one developed in legal scholarship on AI.

Today is my father’s birthday. He was born on October 10, 1914 above a saloon owned by his grandfather.

He did not have a happy childhood and his own father died when my father was just 13 years old. When his grandfather died less than a year later, he became de facto head of the family.

He was an excellent student and was the first person in his family to graduate from high school. He went on to college and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. He went on to law school and graduated from that with a Juris Doctor, something of a rarity in those days. It being the heart of the Depression, jobs were hard to come by so he spent the next year in Europe. We have journals of his experiences there in Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Egypt, and North Africa.

When he returned to the United States he worked as a newspaper editor, writing editorials for the St. Louis Star, then as an insurance claims adjuster. He finally got a job as an associate with a prominent St. Louis law firm and taught law school at night at St. Louis University. He went on to establish his own law practice and was successful at that until his death.

Those attending his wake and funeral included his grade school, high school, and college friends and colleagues.

He was the bravest, kindest, smartest man I’ve ever known.

These are some of my previous posts about him:

Blogging, c. 1940
My Dad’s Birthday, 2007
My Dad, 60 Years Ago
My Dad’s Birthday, 2009
My Dad’s Birthday, 2011
My Dad
My Dad 2
1940s St. Louis
My Father’s Stories

To place this issue in perspective it helps to recognize that Microsoft is among the largest sponsors of H-1B visas. At the Associated Press Seung Min Kim, Rebecca Santana, and Barbara Ortutay report:

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s administration announced Thursday it was suspending Microsoft and several other firms from a program allowing foreign workers to apply for green cards as it also lashed out at universities that bring international students to the U.S. on exchange programs.

The announcement by Vice President JD Vance marks the latest swing from the Trump administration at employers and universities that welcome foreign students and workers into the country.

Such programs have frequently been targeted by some Trump supporters who argue they undercut American students and workers. Supporters say they allow the U.S. to attract the best talent from around the world and fill important hiring gaps.

The announced action freezes new and pending applications under PERM, the permanent labor certification program used for employment-based green cards. PERM requires a finding that sufficient qualified and available U.S. workers cannot be found. The form of fraud alleged by the Trump Administration is advertising the jobs in small town newspapers so they can preferentially rely on H-1B visa holders rather than domestic workers. That’s been going on for decades. I first became aware of this strategy for fifty years ago.

Other companies that sponsor large numbers of H-1B visas include Amazon (18,000), Meta (6,200), TCS (6,100), and Apple (4,600).

I fully anticipate Microsoft’s appealing this particular decision.

IMO stricter enforcement of H-1B visa sponsorship is long overdue but suspending Microsoft’s ability to sponsor is a more aggressive form of enforcement than I anticipated. I would be satisfied merely requiring companies to report the labor performed by contractors offshore to deduct those expenses for tax purposes.

As I have said before it is not my custom to comment on the politics of countries other than my own. That is why I have refrained from remarking on the riots presently roiling France. That has not stopped the editors of the Wall Street Journal:

It’s easy to scoff at French rioting as its national pastime, but what’s unfolding now is different. France is approaching its most serious crisis in decades, and the disorder in the streets may be only the start.

Ostensibly the destructive rioting of the past few days is a student protest against underfunded schools. If you believe that, we have a pont over the Seine to sell you. The riots have been encouraged by politicians on the left, as Dominic Green recently reported on the Journal’s Free Expression newsletter.

Labor-union comrades of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of La France Insoumise (“Indomitable France”), stoked the protests that quickly became riots. Mr. Mélenchon—think Bernie Sanders with a Gallic accent—visited the barricades. It feels like a display of left-wing muscle-flexing before next year’s presidential election, in which Mr. Mélenchon will be a candidate.

The violence obscures the related crisis engulfing public finances. France doesn’t have more money to spend on schools because it doesn’t have more money to spend on anything.

It is on the subject raised in the last paragraph of that quote I want to focus. According the American authorities, France has the highest military readiness of any country in Europe as the U. S. reckons such things. France’s present government spending is more than half of France’s GDP. Here is how it spends the money:

As the editors point out France’s taxes and borrowing are high while its tax revenues rise slowly. They summarize the situation succinctly: every incremental tax euro goes to pensions and health care. Neither of the two major candidates running for president of France supports reducing France’s pension or health care spending. If France increases its borrowing, it will further impede its growth.

Where will the money to increase France’s spending on education come from? The French don’t want to reduce pension or health care spending and France cannot reduce military spending without reducing its readiness and that should be discouraged. France’s conundrum is that it bears the costs of previous decisions to increase the public debt and, as I have said before, there are no mulligans in public life.