Moved no doubt by North Korea’s most recent missile test, the editors of the Washington Post come out in favor of tighter sanctions against the country and those who are aiding it:

After waiting in vain for China to apply serious pressure to the Pyongyang regime following President Trump’s first meeting with Xi Jinping, the administration is readying sanctions against a number of Chinese companies and banks that do business with North Korea, a senior administration official said this week. A sanctions bill on its way through Congress mandates additional steps against North Korean shipping, countries that evade U.N. sanctions and those that employ the slave laborers whom the regime exports to other countries. Still-tougher measures are in a pending Senate bill developed by Maryland Democrat Chris Van Hollen.

If the administration aggressively and consistently exploits the new authorities — an open question, given the endless chaos in the White House and gaping personnel holes at the State Department — it might be able, over time, to cut off a substantial part of the flows of hard currency that last year allowed North Korea to increase its trade by nearly 5 percent and that financed $1.7 billion in imports from China in the first half of 2017.

That’s a remarkably mealy-mouthed and mostly incredible suggestion. The countries providing most of North Korea’s support are: China, Russia, Kuwait, Mongolia, Qatar, and UAE. Chinese banks are particularly problematic. China actually increased its coal sales to North Korea after North Korea’s last missile test despite statements to the contrary.

Could we apply effective sanctions against those countries? Yes. We could cut Chinese banks off from the U. S. banking system (and a lot of the rest of the world’s banks along with them). We could start moving to toss China out of the World Trade Organization (or exit it ourselves). They’ve never complied with the reforms to which they agreed when they were admitted and they never will. Will we? Not a chance. It’s less a case of “don’t wanna” than “can’t”.

So, what’s left? Either watchful waiting or war. I suggest the former.

I was relieved to see that the caption on Gary Marcus’s op-ed in the New York Times, “Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck. Here’s How to Move It Forward.” isn’t really what op-ed was about. It was more a lament for the sorry state of artificial intelligence research than it was a plea for a massive new research program:

Artificial Intelligence is colossally hyped these days, but the dirty little secret is that it still has a long, long way to go. Sure, A.I. systems have mastered an array of games, from chess and Go to “Jeopardy” and poker, but the technology continues to struggle in the real world. Robots fall over while opening doors, prototype driverless cars frequently need human intervention, and nobody has yet designed a machine that can read reliably at the level of a sixth grader, let alone a college student. Computers that can educate themselves — a mark of true intelligence — remain a dream.

“Artificial intelligence” is a grab bag of sometimes interrelated technologies including pattern recognition, natural language processing, expert systems, neural nets, and others. Regardless of the advance press, it has been “stuck” for the last 50 years and is likely to remain so.

Most of the advances in artificial intelligence over that period have been due to faster, more capable computer hardware: faster, better, cheaper processors, memories, networks. The principles of artificial neural networks, for example, have been known for 70 years. Applying them has been incremental and frustrating but it has been greatly facilitated by faster, bigger hardware.

There’s a tremendous difference between artificial intelligence research and building a practical nuclear weapon, putting a man on the moon, or the search for the Higgs boson: the researchers have a pretty darned good idea of what they’re looking for. A more fruitful approach might be more research into natural intelligence but that will require recruiting different people into that field than are usually drawn to it.

At the New York Times I read what I can only describe as the oddest obituary I’ve ever read. It’s the obituary of a career, in this case the journalistic career of Liz Smith, legendary gossip columnist:

She has a laptop, but she doesn’t like it. She has an electric typewriter, which she bought after her stroke at the suggestion of Tom Hanks, a friend, but it sits on the floor because she does not have a desk.

She has her wits, though words sometimes elude her or come out sideways. She even has a column of sorts, which she writes with her longtime collaborator, Denis Ferrara, for a website called New York Social Diary.

What she does not have is a column in a New York tabloid, the Via Veneto of the gossip world. Since The New York Post dropped her in 2009, she has been a herald without a proper platform, rejected by the media names she helped make boldface.

She pleaded with Rupert Murdoch, owner of The Post, not to drop her — no soap.

She offered herself to Mortimer B. Zuckerman, owner of The Daily News, the paper where she made her name. “I said, you have nothing to lose, you don’t even have to pay me a salary,” she said — no soap there, either.

What’s the use of a gossip columnist when you have Facebook? And Google?

It seems to me that this story, reported at the Wall Street Journal, could have enormous implications for the Internet. P&G, long the biggest advertiser in the world, is cutting back on its Internet ads, eliminating ads on sites with fake traffic or objectionable content, and reducing its spending on targeted ads on Facebook. The reason is obvious enough:

Chief Executive David Taylor said in an interview that the digital spending cuts are part of a bigger push by the company to more quickly halt spending on items — from ad campaigns to product development programs — that aren’t working.

“We got some data that said either it was in a bad place or it was not effective,” Mr. Taylor said of the digital cuts. “And we shut it down and said, ‘We’re not going to follow a formula of how much you spend or share of voice. We want every dollar to add value for the consumer or add value for our stakeholders.”

After cutting back on certain digital ads, “we didn’t see a reduction in the growth rate,” said Mr. Moeller during the call. “What that tells me is that the spending we cut was largely ineffective.”

P&G also said it reduced overhead, agency fee and ad-production costs in the quarter.

One of the places they’re changing their practices is Facebook:

The company about a year ago said that it would move away from ads on Facebook that target specific consumers, after finding that ultra-niche targeting compromises reach and has limited effectiveness. P&G indicated it wouldn’t pull back on overall Facebook spending.

I’ve always thought that Facebook’s business model was dubious. I’m not sure how much P&G has been spending on targeted ads at Facebook but my guess is that the loss of this business would smart. If they move from “ultra-niche” to a more general audience without reducing total Facebook advertising spending, it would soften the blow. But that “ultra-niche” focusing is an important part of Facebook’s value proposition. Stay tuned.

Last night I watched episodes of the old My Little Margie television program (1952-1955) streaming on Amazon. It was probably the first time I’d looked at the show since it aired originally. I thought it was harmless fluff but I’m not particularly sensitive to social issues and since all of the characters are stereotypes there are probably lots of people today who would find it objectionable, as much for what it omitted as for what it portrayed.

It’s interesting from a production standpoint. If I’m not mistaken, it was shot with a single camera, unlike the way later TV programs (and movies) have been shot. The actors are almost entirely B movie actors. They do a workmanlike job of producing what is essentially B fare.

An article by John Tozzi at Bloomberg Businessweek provides some useful perspective:

Whatever happens to Obamacare in Washington, the rest of America will be left with a problem it’s had for decades: Health-care spending is growing at an unsustainable rate. Insurance and medical costs are draining the incomes of the middle class—tens of millions of people who earn too much to qualify for government-subsidized coverage, but not so much that they don’t feel the bite of medical bills—and nothing on Congress’s agenda is likely to fix that.

That’s the point I’ve been hammering since 2010. It’s actually worse than he portrays it. Wages aren’t rising. Even when wages are flat total compensation rises because of health care unless the workers shoulder more of the expense of their own health care. If they do shoulder more of the expense of their care, that leaves less for everything else on which they might otherwise spend their money including saving. If they spend less on everything else, that leaves the non-health care economy struggling.

The situation is yet worse when it comes to investment. Health care attracts a disproportionate amount of total investment because, due to the government subsidies amounting to something between 50% and 70% of all health care spending, it’s very nearly a sure thing.

If you can figure out a way that growth in health care spending relative to everything else can continue to increase as rapidly as is reflected in the graph above, I’d like to know about it. There is no such thing as perpetual motion.

There an interesting article at PRI about a startup promoting a model for home solar power that’s either competitive with Tesla’s vision or complementary to it, depending on how you look at it:

The green trend these days is to go local — and if urbanites can source everything from veggies to craft beer in their neighborhoods, why not solar energy?

LO3 Energy, a New York-based startup, is working on one way to do so. Its project, Brooklyn Microgrid, aims to help electricity users buy energy from their energy-producing neighbors, using smart meters and an app.

“Brooklyn Microgrid is the idea that we can now allow peer-to-peer transactions of energy and energy attributes across the grid,” says Scott Kessler, director of business development at LO3 Energy. “So, if you’re producing via solar panels, via wind, whatever energy-generation resource you might have, you can now actually transact with your neighbor,” keeping the energy’s environmental and economic impact in the community.

Kessler says about 60 microgrid meters have already been installed at energy-producing buildings across Brooklyn, and around 350 people have signed up to participate. The project doesn’t involve rewiring the physical grid, he explains; it just tweaks how electricity is bought and sold. “So, it’s really just a new form of settlements among people,” he says.

The new project relies on blockchain — the same secure digital ledger used in cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. In its pilot phase, neighbors traded test versions of renewable-energy credits, according to The New York Times. Now, Kessler says, the team is working with regulators to define how electricity can legally be traded through the microgrid in the future.

“We’re not a utility, we’re not a generator, and we’re not really an energy retailer,” Kessler says. “So, how do we fit in, and how can we start to trade energy legally while still providing all the protections that folks on the electric grid are accustomed to?”

If I understand what they’re doing, they’re actually brokering electrical power among the participants.

The article raises all sorts of questions for me. Clearly, such a scheme would change the economics of installing solar panels. In any given city block how many producers would be needed to satisfy the ordinary electrical demands of pure consumers during daylight hours? My back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests about 1 to 1 although if more efficient solar panels start coming down the pike that could be improved upon.

There are other advantages, as mentioned in the article. For example, areas in which such a system were deployed would be more resilient than those without.

Another question: how would this arrangement be regulated and taxed? Don’t imagine that cities will be willing to give up the electricity tax revenues they’re realizing now.

I want to commend a paper at the Brookings Institution on U. S. policy with respect to Afghanistan to your attention. The paper takes the form of a transcript of a discussion among a panel of policy experts. The members of the panel agree on a number of things:

• We’ve accomplished our original goal in Afghanistan long since.
• That objective transmogrified over time into generalized support for the Afghan government.
• Progress on that goal has been elusive.
• President Obama’s concern about America’s impatience was wrong.
• President Trump’s decision to give the Pentagon a longer leash on troop strength was probably the right one.
• Our force levels in Afghanistan should be increased.
• Sustaining that will require a substantial sales job.

Part of the sales job needed will be reducing expectations for what we can accomplish there. How low can you go?

At Project Syndicate Brahma Chellaney reviews some cases in which China has used trade as a lever in accomplishing non-economic objectives:

NEW DELHI – China denies mixing business with politics, yet it has long used trade to punish countries that refuse to toe its line. China’s recent heavy-handed economic sanctioning of South Korea, in response to that country’s decision to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile system, was just the latest example of the Chinese authorities’ use of trade as a political weapon.

Like war trade is policy by other means. The United States has been using trade to accomplish non-economic objectives for well over a century. Why should China be any exception?