Links

Why the Scariest Nuclear Threat May Be Coming from Inside the White House

Source: Why the Scariest Nuclear Threat May Be Coming from Inside the White House, by Michael Lewis (2017/07/26)

“Just give me the top five risks I need to worry about right away. Start at the top.”
…
At the very top of his list is an accident with nuclear weapons … “I would encourage you to spend an hour reading about Broken Arrows.”
…
“North Korea would be up there,” says MacWilliams. … the people inside the national labs are the world’s most qualified to determine just what North Korea’s missiles can do.
…
“This is in no particular order,” he says with remarkable patience. “But Iran is somewhere in the top five.” He’d watched Secretary Moniz help negotiate the deal that removed from Iran the capacity to acquire a nuclear weapon. There were only three paths to a nuclear weapon. … enriched uranium … plutonium … buy a weapon … The national labs played a big role in policing all three paths. … At any rate, the serious risk in Iran wasn’t that the Iranians would secretly acquire a weapon. It was that the president of the United States would not understand his nuclear scientists’ reasoning about the unlikelihood of the Iranians’ obtaining a weapon, and that he would have the United States back away foolishly from the deal. Released from the complicated set of restrictions on its nuclear-power program, Iran would then build its bomb. It wasn’t enough to have the world’s finest forensic nuclear physicists. Our political leaders needed to be predisposed to listen to them and equipped to understand what they say.
…
His more general point was that managing risks was an act of the imagination. And the human imagination is a poor tool for judging risk. … What was most easily imagined was not what was most probable. It wasn’t the things you think of when you try to think of bad things happening that got you killed, he said. “It is the less detectable, systemic risks.” Another way of putting this is: The risk we should most fear is not the risk we easily imagine. It is the risk that we don’t.
…
I realized later that the fifth risk did not put him at risk of revealing classified information. To begin, he said simply, “Project management.” … the risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions. … It is delaying repairs to a tunnel filled with lethal waste until, one day, it collapses. … It is what you never learned that might have saved you.

It turned out no one wanted to make a serious study of the risks at Hanford. Not the contractors who stood to make lots of money from things chugging along as they have. Not the career people inside the D.O.E. who oversaw the project and who feared that an open acknowledgment of all the risks was an invitation to even more lawsuits. Not the citizens of Eastern Washington, who count on the $3 billion a year flowing into their region from the federal government. Only one stakeholder in the place wanted to know what was going on beneath its soil: the tribes. A radioactive ruin does not crumble without consequences, and yet, even now, no one can say what these are.

A Nobel Prize-winning economist thinks we’re asking all the wrong questions about inequality

Source: A Nobel Prize-winning economist thinks we’re asking all the wrong questions about inequality

“Inequality is not the same thing as unfairness; and, to my mind, it is the latter that has incited so much political turmoil in the rich world today.”

— Angus Deaton
economics professor at Princeton and recipient of the 2015 Nobel Prize in economics

What’s unfair
…
Each year, the US wastes a trillion dollars ($8,000 per family) more than other wealthy nations on healthcare costs, with worse outcomes.
…
Many industries, like tech, media, and healthcare, are now run by a few, large companies.
…
Twenty percent of workers sign non-compete clauses, which prevent them from taking on side-hustles, reducing their incomes and bargaining power. What’s more, over half of non-union, privately employed Americans—some 60 million people—have signed mandatory arbitration agreements, which means they can never sue their employers.
…
Companies are increasingly replacing full-time, salaried workers with contractors.
…
As median wages have stagnated, corporate profits relative to GDP have grown 20% to 25%.

In 2018 you don’t need to exercise more—you need to move more

Source: In 2018 you don’t need to exercise more—you need to move more

In our fervor for high intensity exercise, we seem to forget about exercise’s older, more elemental sibling: movement.

“We can grasp sedentary behavior as it relates to exercise because it’s easy to see the difference between exercising one hour a day and not exercising one hour a day,” Bowman writes. But few of us contemplate the “difference between exercising one hour a day and not exercising the other twenty-three.”

The link between polygamy and war

Source: The link between polygamy and war

Plural marriage, bred of inequality, begets violence

Wherever it is widely practised, polygamy (specifically polygyny, the taking of multiple wives) destabilises society, largely because it is a form of inequality which creates an urgent distress in the hearts, and loins, of young men. If a rich man has a Lamborghini, that does not mean that a poor man has to walk, for the supply of cars is not fixed. By contrast, every time a rich man takes an extra wife, another poor man must remain single. If the richest and most powerful 10% of men have, say, four wives each, the bottom 30% of men cannot marry. Young men will take desperate measures to avoid this state.

My Internet Mea Culpa – Rick Webb

Source: My Internet Mea Culpa – Rick Webb

I believed that the world would be a better place if everyone had a voice. I believed that the world would be a better place if we all had no secrets.
…
If I had known in 1994 that this whole internet thing would have brought generations — generations — of pain before the solution came, it would have been a totally different decision process for me to help it out.
…
Perhaps everyone on the planet needs to learn how to use all of this new power responsibly … And, again, perhaps it will take generations.
…
With both of these explanations for what went wrong, there is still a strong argument to keep at it. … But there is another possibility to consider: What if we were fundamentally wrong? … What if we were never meant to be a global species? … What if information doesn’t want to be free?
…
I would like every one that sold me — and everyone else — this bag of goods to address these possibilities. Failing that, I’d like them to offer other explanations for where we’re at now, and how we get to the promised land.