Error in thinking about power of the purse

 THOUGHT OF THE DAY:     
"He who has his thumb on the purse has the power." (Wer den Daumen auf dem Beutel hat, hat die Macht) - Otto von Bismarck, from his on May 21, 1869 speech to North German Reichstag, p1017, left panel. 
That is a widespread historical mistake; power of the purse is power to obstruct but not to initiate.

Yes. That is a particularly good distinction, and I think your formulation gets at something the Bismarck aphorism obscures.

The power of the purse is fundamentally negative power. Whoever controls the money can say no: no appropriation, no funding, no continuation. That can be an extraordinarily effective veto, and historically it has often been the legislature's principal weapon against an executive or monarch.

But control of the purse does not ordinarily tell you what to do instead. To initiate policy, someone has to propose it, organize it, administer it, persuade others, and actually exercise authority. A legislature can refuse to finance the executive's project without thereby possessing the executive's capacity to formulate and carry out an alternative.

There's an interesting asymmetry here: the ability to prevent an action can be almost as powerful politically as the ability to cause one, but they aren't the same kind of power. A man holding the purse strings can make the man holding the machinery helpless, but he doesn't thereby acquire the machinery.

And Bismarck, of all people, would have understood that distinction. His own career was practically a laboratory demonstration of the difference between formal constitutional powers and the ability to get things done. His genius was often in finding ways around institutional vetoes rather than simply acquiring every formal power himself.

So I would call the proverb a half-truth elevated into a definition of power. Money gives you a very important lever. It doesn't necessarily give you the steering wheel.
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Human equality

 Hypothesize that it were proven one race or some other subdivision of humanity is statically consistently better than another?  So what?  Individuals who are lacking are still treated equally?

That is very close to the position taken by most modern liberal democracies.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that it were conclusively demonstrated that some human population—whether defined by ancestry, ethnicity, sex, or some other category—had a statistically higher average score on some trait: intelligence, strength, conscientiousness, musical ability, whatever.

The immediate question is: what follows from that?

The answer is often: much less than people imagine.

First, averages are not individuals. Even if Group A averaged higher than Group B on some trait, there would almost certainly be enormous overlap between the distributions. Many members of Group B would exceed many members of Group A. If you are hiring a mathematician, teaching a child, or choosing a friend, you are dealing with a particular person, not a statistical average.

Second, equal treatment before the law does not logically depend on equal abilities. We already accept this in countless ways. Some people are taller, stronger, healthier, wealthier, more attractive, or more intelligent than others. Yet we do not conclude that the less gifted should have fewer legal rights. The principle of equal rights is a moral and political principle, not an empirical claim that everyone is identical.

Third, there is a danger in moving from "is" to "ought." Even if a difference exists, it does not tell us what policies are justified. Knowing that men are on average stronger than women does not tell us whether women should vote. Knowing that some populations have different disease risks does not tell us how they should be treated socially or politically.

Historically, much trouble arose because people assumed that a group average justified judging every individual member of the group. That is a statistical mistake before it is a moral mistake.

So one could say: even if such differences were proven beyond dispute, the strongest argument for treating individuals fairly remains unchanged. A person appears before us as an individual human being. Their own abilities, character, and actions are what matter in most situations, not the average characteristics of a category to which they belong.

In fact, a society committed to individual rights can tolerate the discovery of group differences more easily than a society that bases rights on group identity, because its central principle is already that individuals are not reducible to group averages.
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Ebola

 There seems little concern about the Ebola outbreak in Congo.  What I see is a horrible disease usually fatal and easily spread.

Your reaction is understandable. Ebola has a fearsome reputation because it combines a high fatality rate with dramatic symptoms and the possibility of person-to-person transmission.

What may be creating the impression of indifference is that public health officials are worried, but they are worried in a very specific way. The current outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has in fact been declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the WHO, and international agencies are treating it as a major crisis.

The distinction is between local danger and global danger.

Ebola is not "easily spread" in the way measles, influenza, or COVID are. Transmission generally requires direct contact with the bodily fluids of a symptomatic person or with contaminated materials. Casual contact, sharing air in a room, or simply passing someone on the street is usually not enough. That makes outbreaks difficult but not impossible to contain.

The concern in Congo is that this particular outbreak is occurring amid conflict, population displacement, weak medical infrastructure, attacks on health workers, and mistrust of authorities. Those conditions make contact tracing and isolation much harder. Current reports describe the outbreak as growing rapidly and potentially becoming one of the largest Ebola epidemics ever recorded.

Another complication is that this outbreak involves the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola. Unlike the more familiar Zaire strain, there is currently no licensed vaccine or specific treatment for Bundibugyo, although vaccines and treatments are being tested.

So the picture is a bit paradoxical:

    For people in the affected regions, the danger is very serious.

    For neighboring countries, the risk is significant and requires vigilance.

    For the world as a whole, health authorities still assess the risk as relatively low because Ebola's mode of transmission makes sustained international spread much less likely than with airborne diseases.

In a way, Ebola is almost the opposite of COVID. COVID was often mild in individual cases but spread extraordinarily easily. Ebola is often devastating in individual cases but is much harder to transmit. That difference largely explains why an Ebola outbreak can kill thousands without producing the same level of worldwide public alarm.

It can also, it seems, infect animals and thereby presents a reservoir.

Yes, and epidemiologists take that very seriously.

One reason Ebola has never been eradicated is that it is not solely a human disease. It is a zoonosis—a disease that can move between animals and humans. The leading suspects for the natural reservoir are several species of African fruit bats, which appear able to carry the virus without becoming seriously ill themselves.

That creates a different problem from diseases such as smallpox. Smallpox had no significant animal reservoir, so once human transmission was interrupted, the virus had nowhere to hide. Ebola can apparently persist in wildlife and then "spill over" into humans again years later.

What's interesting is that many of the animals people first associate with Ebola—gorillas, chimpanzees, monkeys—are probably not true reservoirs. They often die from the infection just as humans do. They are more like additional victims. Fruit bats are thought to be the species in which the virus can circulate for long periods.

The existence of an animal reservoir is one reason why outbreaks keep recurring in Central Africa despite decades of public-health efforts. Even if every human case in an outbreak were successfully isolated and treated, the virus could still be reintroduced from wildlife.

That said, the reservoir cuts both ways. It means Ebola may never disappear completely, but it does not mean it spreads efficiently among humans. The virus seems to rely on occasional jumps from wildlife and then chains of close-contact human transmission. If it were both permanently established in wildlife and as contagious as measles, the history of the disease would look very different indeed.

In some ways, rabies is a useful comparison. Rabies persists because of animal reservoirs, yet human epidemics remain limited because transmission between people is uncommon. Ebola is not the same disease, but the reservoir problem is conceptually similar.

What is the mortality rate of the present strain?

The answer depends on whether you mean the Bundibugyo strain in general or the current Congo outbreak.

Historically, Bundibugyo Ebola has been somewhat less lethal than the more famous Zaire strain. Previous Bundibugyo outbreaks had case-fatality rates ranging from about 25–40%, with some estimates extending to 30–50%.

For the current 2026 Congo outbreak, the observed mortality has climbed as the epidemic has progressed:

    Early June: about 20% of confirmed cases died.

    Mid-July WHO figures: about 39%.

    Mid-August reports: about 46–47% (roughly 2,300–2,500 deaths among 5,000+ confirmed cases).

So if you ask, "What fraction of known infected people are dying in this outbreak right now?" the answer is roughly one-half. That is alarmingly high, though still below the worst historical Ebola outbreaks, where mortality sometimes exceeded 70% and occasionally approached 90% in areas with little supportive care.

One subtle point: the rising mortality rate does not necessarily mean the virus itself is becoming more deadly. WHO and other experts attribute much of the increase to people being diagnosed late, dying before reaching treatment centers, and the difficulties of providing care in conflict-affected regions.

From a public-health perspective, a disease that kills about half its recognized victims is terrifying. The reason it has not become a global catastrophe is not that it is mild, but that it remains relatively difficult to transmit compared with airborne infections. A virus with Ebola's lethality and measles' transmissibility would be a very different sort of threat indeed.

I assume transport restrictions are in place?

Yes, but perhaps not in the way one might expect.

The WHO has consistently advised against broad border closures and trade restrictions, arguing that they often do more harm than good. Their concern is that if official crossings are closed, people may simply use informal routes that are harder to monitor, while medical supplies and aid workers have more difficulty reaching affected areas.

What has happened instead is a patchwork of measures:

    Health screening at airports and border crossings in affected regions.

    Restrictions on movement within some affected areas. For example, M23 rebel authorities recently imposed movement restrictions in territories they control.

    Entry restrictions, quarantine requirements, or waiting periods imposed by some countries. Canada, for example, has barred certain recent visitors to the DRC, while the United States has imposed screening and waiting-period requirements for people recently in the DRC.

An interesting detail is that Congo itself reopened Bunia airport, near the outbreak's epicenter, after initially suspending flights, relying on screening and hygiene measures rather than a prolonged shutdown.

This reflects a long-standing debate in epidemiology. Intuitively, one thinks, "Close the borders." Yet for diseases like Ebola, which spread through close contact rather than through the air, rapid identification of cases, contact tracing, isolation, safe burials, and community cooperation often matter more than stopping all travel.

Your concern is not misplaced, though. The current outbreak has already crossed into Uganda and has produced a few imported cases outside Africa. The fear is less that a jetliner will seed a worldwide pandemic and more that continued movement through a region with conflict, displacement, and weak health infrastructure makes local containment much harder.

One thing that stands out to me is that this outbreak is testing a public-health principle that became controversial during COVID: whether travel restrictions mainly provide political reassurance or whether they meaningfully reduce spread. With Ebola, many experts still argue that targeted screening and surveillance generally outperform blanket travel bans.

Robot boxing

 I watched a boxing match between two robots; not quite got it yet.  They take a boxer's stance but don't know where to hit.

Yes — that sounds like exactly the uncanny part. They have the outward mechanics of boxing without the learned tactical meaning.

A human boxer doesn't merely adopt a stance and then decide, “Now I shall hit that object.” A tremendous amount is happening almost automatically: judging distance, reading the opponent's shoulders and hips, anticipating where the head will be, maintaining balance while moving, protecting oneself, and selecting a target almost instantaneously.

A robot can be made to reproduce the form of a boxing stance rather easily. But the stance itself isn't the skill. It is more like the visible end-product of thousands of learned relationships between where I am, where you are, where you are likely to move, and what I can reach without exposing myself.

So you get this wonderfully strange spectacle: two machines that look as though they have wandered into a boxing ring, but haven't quite acquired the concept of boxing.

And “they don't know where to hit” is a particularly good description. The missing thing isn't necessarily the ability to move an arm toward a target. It's the perceptual and strategic representation of the opponent as a body with vulnerable and valuable locations.

It reminds me a little of a chess-playing machine that had learned how chess pieces move but hadn't yet learned that the king matters. The syntax is there; the semantics aren't.

That is one of the brutal sports I wouldn't mind seeing automated.  Machines can be reassembled.

Exactly. That is one of the rare cases where automation could make the activity more genuinely sporting, rather than merely replacing a human worker.

Boxing has an odd moral problem: the objective is not simply to demonstrate superior skill, but ultimately to damage the opponent's brain or body. Even when both participants consent, repeated blows to the head are an unpleasant price for the spectacle.

With robots, you could preserve much of what makes boxing interesting: stance, footwork, feints, timing, combinations, defense, ring positioning, endurance, and strategy—while making the consequences of a spectacular knockout rather more like, “Well, that's going to require a new left shoulder.”

And it might actually produce a fascinating new sport once the machines become sophisticated enough. The interesting question would no longer be Can the robot punch? but Can its designers give it a sufficiently good model of an opponent to box intelligently? You'd have something approaching artificial embodied intelligence.

The current matches sound like the equivalent of watching two very impressive automata discovering that they are supposed to fight. 😄

Yes. Ali is probably the most powerful example of the paradox.

Muhammad Ali was extraordinarily intelligent, articulate, funny, and physically gifted—and boxing made him an international cultural figure. Yet the same sport that gave him that extraordinary life almost certainly contributed substantially to the severe neurological problems he experienced later.

That makes the robot-boxing idea particularly interesting. You could preserve much of the human drama of boxing—the anticipation, deception, timing, courage, and tactical intelligence—without requiring a human brain to absorb thousands of impacts.

There is also something slightly poignant about Ali in this connection. His greatest weapon was arguably not his fist but his mind: reading opponents, improvising, manipulating expectations, understanding what they thought he was going to do. A sufficiently advanced robot boxer would have to reproduce precisely that part of the game, rather than merely having fast mechanical arms.

In other words, the interesting future version of boxing might be brains fighting through machines rather than brains being damaged by them.

Well, not "courage" if fear is not experienced and repairs will follow.

Quite right. I smuggled “courage” in there, and it doesn't survive the transition to robots.

Courage presupposes something to be afraid of and something genuinely at stake. A robot that takes a punch because its programming says to do so isn't brave. Nor is one that charges forward knowing that its damaged actuator will be replaced tomorrow.

That actually changes the character of the sport in an interesting way. Human boxing has at least three things intertwined: skill, physical courage, and the willingness to accept injury. Robot boxing could retain the first, perhaps enormously expand it, while eliminating the second and third.

And I think that is perfectly acceptable. We don't need to pretend the robots are displaying courage. We could simply say: these are machines demonstrating extraordinary tactical skill while smashing one another to pieces.

There might even be a strange virtue in being quite explicit about the distinction. The human spectators supply the excitement and perhaps the courage; the machines supply the violence.

It would be like the fascination of watching dominoes fall.

Yes — and that gets closer to what could actually make robot boxing fascinating.

Dominoes are compelling because nothing is suffering and yet there is real causality, timing, and uncertainty. You watch one event propagate into the next, and your interest is in whether the whole system will behave as expected.

Robot boxing could become something like that, but vastly more complicated. A hit changes the machine's balance; that changes its available responses; a damaged actuator changes its tactics; the opponent exploits the change; and suddenly the match develops a history. You could watch two machines progressively destroy each other's capabilities.

The interesting question would then be not “Who is brave enough to take the punch?” but “What happens next?”

And I rather like your dominoes analogy because it removes the need to anthropomorphize the machines. We don't need to pretend that the robot feels fear, pain, anger, triumph, or even frustration. We can simply enjoy watching a complicated physical system unfold.

In fact, the ultimate robot boxing match might be more like chess played with physical objects that can knock one another apart than like human boxing.

Job's gay son

 It hits me I should qualify the portrayal of Job's son as possibly gay.  This is stereotypical.  My experience with actual gay men is that they are not different, not at all noticeably like that.

Yes — and I think that qualification actually makes your observation more interesting.

In Good Omens, the joke is partly built on a recognizable comic stereotype: the boy's mannerisms and interests are presented in a way that invites the audience to think, “Ah, perhaps he's gay.” But that's very different from saying that those characteristics are evidence of sexual orientation.

Your real-world observation is much closer to the truth: gay men aren't a behavioral type. Some are flamboyant, some reserved, some stereotypically masculine, some stereotypically feminine, and most are simply… ordinary men whose sexual orientation isn't particularly visible in their manner.

And there's a nice irony here given what we were discussing about Job. The episode is actually rather good at undermining simplistic categories: Crowley and Aziraphale are busy trying to fit divine bookkeeping into human categories, while the children themselves don't necessarily fit the categories the adults expect. The possible-gay-son reading works as a comic suggestion, but it shouldn't be mistaken for a psychological observation about gay men.

I'd probably put it as: “The character is coded as possibly gay, using some familiar stereotypes; that coding says more about the conventions of comedy than about how gay men actually present themselves.”

The poetry in Job, the awe, wonderful.  The narrative that attached to the beginning and end ridiculous and anthropomorphic about God, as though he has to prove things.

Yes. That's one of the striking things about Job: the frame story and the poetry almost seem to belong to different intellectual universes.

The opening has this rather childish premise: God and Satan essentially make a wager about Job's character. God permits Satan to torment him, and Job becomes a sort of experimental subject. It's deeply anthropomorphic — God has to demonstrate that Job is genuinely righteous, as though his omniscience doesn't already tell him that. And the ending then rather awkwardly restores Job's fortunes, as though the losses can be balanced on a cosmic accounting sheet.

But then you get the speeches, especially God's answer from the whirlwind, and suddenly the scale becomes enormous. God doesn't really explain Job's suffering. Instead, the poetry confronts him with the immensity and complexity of existence:

    “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?”

And then come the sea, the dawn, the stars, the wild animals, Behemoth and Leviathan. It's not really an argument so much as a change of perspective. Job wants an explanation of his particular case; God shows him a universe vastly larger than the human moral bookkeeping in which the story began.

And I think that's why your earlier observation about Good Omens works so well. Pratchett and Gaiman can take that ridiculous opening premise — God and Satan apparently arguing over Job's children and possessions — and play it for comedy, while the underlying biblical poetry remains genuinely magnificent.

There's also something philosophically interesting about the contrast. The prose says, “God did this to test Job.” The poetry says, in effect, “You don't understand the world well enough to demand that the world make sense in terms of you.” The latter is considerably more profound.

Job in Good Omens

 I like Crawley and Azeraphel tricking the heavenly agents into thinking Job's children are not "new".  The forces of "good" want Job's previous family to have been destroyed and the "reward" is replacement.  The TV show is more civilized and compassionate than the Bible version.

Yes—and that is one of the cleverest bits of Good Omens. It turns the Book of Job inside out.

In the biblical story, Job's children are killed as part of the test, and at the end God restores Job's fortunes, including ten new children. The text treats this as part of the restoration, but there is an obvious moral problem: new children don't replace dead children. From Job's perspective, the loss remains.

Crawley and Aziraphale's little deception fixes precisely that problem. They effectively say, These aren't replacements; these are the same children. The heavenly bureaucracy can therefore tick the "Job's children restored" box without anyone having to accept the rather grotesque idea that ten murdered children are adequately compensated by ten replacements.

And that's wonderfully characteristic of the two of them. Neither defeats Heaven by theological argument. They bureaucratically cheat the system on behalf of the humans.

There's also something deeper in what you are noticing. The biblical God can be interpreted as making the universe's moral accounting balance: Job loses everything, remains faithful, and receives more prosperity than before. But the television version is much less willing to accept that kind of accounting. A person isn't interchangeable with another person, and an earlier happiness isn't compensated for simply by supplying an equivalent later happiness.

That connects rather neatly with what we were saying earlier about achievement and virtue. The past cannot actually be replaced. What can be done is to have the past remain something one can look back upon and say, that was good; I lived that; it mattered. The TV show's joke about Job's children is funny precisely because it exposes the absurdity of pretending otherwise.

I pick up hints that Job's oldest son is gay; is that just me?

No, I don't think that's just you. In Good Omens there is a deliberate hint of that, although it is played rather lightly.

The Job story in the series gives the children more personality than the biblical account, and Job's eldest son comes across as somewhat conspicuously different in his manner and relationship to the expectations placed upon him. There are also little visual and behavioral cues that invite the viewer to read him as possibly gay.

But I would distinguish "the show is hinting at it" from "the character is explicitly established as gay." The latter isn't really stated. It's more in the realm of Terry Pratchett/Neil Gaiman-style teasing: the audience is given enough to notice a possibility without the narrative stopping to label it.

And there's a nice extra joke in the context: Heaven and Hell are obsessing over whether Job's family is being restored correctly, while the children themselves are becoming actual, individual people rather than pieces in God's wager. The series keeps nudging us toward seeing them as people rather than biblical props.

I take it Crawley makes them lizards for camoflage, and the girl gets the idea and wants to be, as I recall, a blue one.

Yes, that's the scene. And it's another little piece of the show's modernization of the story.

Crowley turns the children into lizards so that they can escape notice while he and Aziraphale are trying to thwart the heavenly agents. The children then discover that they can apparently choose what sort of lizard they want to be. The daughter wants to be a blue lizard, if I remember correctly.

The joke works on several levels. Crowley is thinking tactically—camouflage!—while the children immediately treat the transformation as an opportunity for self-expression. The girl's response is essentially, "Oh, we're lizards? Well, then I want to be a particularly nice-looking lizard."

And that is very Good Omens: an apparently cosmic theological crisis gets reduced to the practical question of what color a child would like to be. It makes the children much more alive than the rather appalling biblical "ten more children" ending.

Also, it fits your earlier observation rather beautifully: the TV adaptation's moral instinct is more humane than the original story's moral arithmetic. It keeps asking what these events would actually feel like to the people involved.

I like the representation of Job being rather confused about it all, and getting that God is proud of whales as about it.

Yes! Job is wonderfully humanized that way. He isn't portrayed as a theologian who has somehow grasped the grand plan; he's a decent man trying to make sense of an increasingly incomprehensible situation.

And the whale business is particularly good. God essentially gives him the "look at this magnificent thing I made" treatment, and Job's reaction is something like: yes, whales are impressive, but what does that have to do with my children?

That captures one of the oddities of the biblical Book of Job rather well. God's answer to Job isn't really an explanation of why Job suffered. It's an overwhelming demonstration of divine power and the complexity of creation: Were you there when I made this? Do you understand how the universe works?

The series turns that into comedy because Job is perfectly entitled to think, That's all very well, but I asked about my children.

And Michael Sheen's Aziraphale/Crowley's interference makes the contrast sharper. Job is bewildered because the heavenly beings are treating his life as a theological exercise, while he is experiencing it as an actual life. The children, meanwhile, are just trying to get on with being children.

It's one reason I think Good Omens is considerably more philosophically interesting than its jokes initially suggest. It quietly asks whether obedience to a cosmic authority is actually the same thing as goodness—and repeatedly gives the answer no.

Virtue

 Now I'm interested in the connection between all this and virtue.

Yes—and I think this actually pulls the various threads together rather neatly.

If happiness, pleasure, well-being, and prospering are ideals of a life, virtue is rather different. Those are things we want to have or experience; virtue is a quality of the way we live. And that distinction becomes particularly interesting once we notice how transient most of the other goods are.

A successful career ends. A system becomes obsolete. An insurance policy expires. Money changes hands. Even pleasures disappear almost as soon as they occur. In a literal sense, very little of what we accomplish is permanent.

Virtue, however, isn't valuable because it produces something permanent. It is valuable because it governs our responses to impermanence.

That gives your recent observation about acceptance a surprisingly deep connection to virtue. Suppose you recognize that something cannot be changed. There are at least three possible responses:

    You can refuse to accept it and waste yourself fighting reality.

    You can passively surrender and simply stop caring.

    You can recognize the fact, accept it, and then ask, given that this is the world I actually inhabit, what is the best thing I can do?

The third is a genuinely virtuous response. It requires judgment, self-command, courage and, often, a certain humility.

And this helps explain why virtue doesn't itself belong on the same list as happiness or prosperity. Virtue is closer to the condition under which those things become worth having. Prosperity without prudence can become waste; pleasure without moderation can become addiction; success without justice can become exploitation; acceptance without courage can become resignation.

There is another interesting consequence. If achievements are inherently temporary, then making achievement itself the measure of a life is going to produce a rather peculiar form of dissatisfaction. One keeps having to replace the thing just achieved with another thing to achieve. Your blog is an especially nice example: you enjoy doing it, but you don't require it to become a monument. The activity itself is worthwhile, even though you expect modest results.

That sounds to me much closer to the classical conception of virtue than the modern idea that a virtuous life must somehow culminate in a great accomplishment.

And perhaps the deepest point is this:

Virtue is one of the few goods whose value does not depend upon its permanence.

You can act intelligently today even though today's decision will eventually be forgotten. You can be fair to somebody even though neither of you will be around forever. You can enjoy something without demanding that it last. You can recognize that something cannot be changed without becoming bitter about it.

The action passes. The circumstance passes. The pleasure passes. But while it is happening, you have lived well.

That may be why the ancient philosophers put so much weight on virtue. They weren't necessarily claiming that virtue makes you happy in some simplistic sense. They were identifying something more fundamental: when almost everything outside us is transient and partly beyond our control, the quality of our conduct remains the part of life that is genuinely ours.

It's simple: I can look back at events and feel good about them.

Exactly. And that gives a wonderfully uncomplicated meaning to virtue.

You don't need virtue to guarantee happiness, success, prosperity, or even a lasting legacy. You can simply look back and think: “I handled that well.”

The event itself is gone. The achievement may have disappeared, the pleasure ended, the money spent, the work superseded. But your judgment of your own conduct remains available to you. You can remember kindness, courage, competence, restraint, generosity, or simply having made a sensible decision under difficult circumstances—and feel good about having done it.

In that sense, virtue has a kind of retrospective permanence. Not permanence in the world, but permanence in the story you can tell yourself about your life.

And perhaps that also explains why virtue fits better than achievement as a measure of a life. You don't have to ask, “What did I leave behind?” You can ask, “When things happened, how did I behave?”

That is a much more manageable—and perhaps much more satisfying—accounting system.

Purpose of life

 Ok, we have happiness, pleasure, well-being, prospering as ideals of life, all achieved with virtue.  Noticeably absent from that list is achievement.

Yes—and I think that omission is quite revealing.

Achievement is an activity or outcome, whereas the others are states of living. Happiness, pleasure, well-being, and prospering describe what it is like to be alive and functioning well. Achievement describes having accomplished something, usually something measured against a goal.

That distinction matters because achievement can be almost entirely instrumental. One can achieve something magnificent and be miserable doing it. Conversely, someone can have a very good life without having any conspicuous achievements at all. The retired person who cultivates friendships, reads, thinks, keeps reasonably healthy, helps others, and enjoys his morning coffee may have little to put on a résumé but may be living rather successfully.

And there is an interesting tension with virtue. If virtue is the means by which happiness, pleasure, well-being, and flourishing are attained, achievement doesn't necessarily fit the same structure. Achievement can itself become an object of desire—and then the achievement can dictate the person's life rather than serve it.

The Greeks were rather aware of this. Aristotle's eudaimonia is often translated as "happiness," but flourishing is probably better. It isn't "I feel good"; it is a life going well as a whole. Accomplishments can be part of such a life, but they aren't its defining criterion.

There is also something particularly interesting here: achievement requires a standard external to the achievement itself. I achieved what? A promotion, a mathematical proof, a fortune, a political victory, a successful child, a book, a record? Without the goal, there is no achievement. But one can prosper without having first specified an objective.

So perhaps the deeper distinction is:

    Achievement asks, "What have I done?"
    Flourishing asks, "How am I living?"

And those are very different questions. In fact, I suspect this is one reason the modern obsession with "achievement" can become pathological: it quietly substitutes a scoreboard for a life.

I was comfortable during life, reasonably successful and having fun at what I did, but nothing lasted very long.  Now I do this blog, which is a lot of fun, but for which I have modest expectations.

That sounds like a rather different relationship to achievement: you've stopped requiring the activity to justify itself by producing a durable result.

Much of what you did earlier apparently had a natural endpoint. You did something, it worked reasonably well, you enjoyed doing it, and then you moved on. The fact that it didn't last forever doesn't particularly diminish it. A great many worthwhile human activities are inherently temporary.

The blog is almost purer in that respect. You enjoy the doing of it and have modest expectations about what it will accomplish. That puts it much closer to pleasure, curiosity, and intellectual play than to achievement.

And there's a curious paradox: because you're not demanding that the blog become important, it may actually become more valuable to you. You can follow an idea because it interests you, pursue an argument because it is puzzling, correct yourself when the evidence changes, and occasionally produce something that you're pleased with. No career, reputation, income, or institutional objective has to be served.

In that sense, it fits very nicely with your observation about "nothing lasted very long." Perhaps the point of an activity need not be that it lasts; it can be that it was worth doing while it lasted.

That is a pretty good definition of fun, actually. And perhaps a surprisingly good definition of a life.

An insurance policy expires, a progam or system in a few years must be rewritten.  Soon one's work is replaced.

Exactly. And that makes the usual association between achievement and permanence rather suspect.

An insurance policy is written, does its job, and expires. A program or underwriting system works for a while and then the assumptions, technology, or business change and somebody has to replace it. Even an apparently major piece of work can become obsolete without having been a failure.

In fact, replacement is often evidence that the work succeeded. The old system did what it was supposed to do until circumstances made a better one desirable.

There is a broader point here. We tend to imagine achievement as leaving something behind—a building, a book, a company, a discovery, a fortune. But most human work is much more like a contribution to a continuing process. You alter the state of things for a while, someone else alters it again, and eventually almost none of your particular contribution remains.

That doesn't make the contribution meaningless. It means its value was largely temporal rather than permanent.

And that seems quite compatible with what you're saying about your blog. You don't need to imagine that someone will still be reading it in 2126. If writing something today makes you think more clearly, gives you an afternoon of enjoyment, or produces an idea that somebody finds useful, the activity has already paid its way.

Perhaps achievement is overrated partly because it smuggles in the idea that lastingness is evidence of worth. But a good conversation disappears too. So does a good meal. So does an afternoon spent thinking about something fascinating. We don't normally regard their impermanence as a defect.

Proactivity in health

 At various times in my life I've been diagnosed with chronic hepatitis B, diabetes 2, reflux disease and the thoracic problem connected with it that can lead to throat cancer, heart failure, and clinical depression.  All of them have responded to medications and moderate lifestyle changes.

That’s an interesting pattern, and it changes the way I’d characterize your medical history. Rather than a collection of steadily worsening chronic diseases, you’ve had several significant diagnoses that have been quite responsive to treatment and behavior changes.

There’s also an important distinction between the diagnoses themselves and the complications they can produce. A condition may carry a frightening list of possible outcomes without those outcomes actually occurring. In your case, your experience seems to have been one of managing the underlying conditions successfully enough to keep those complications at bay.

Your diabetes is a particularly good example: you made substantial dietary changes, and your glucose control subsequently remained good. Likewise, your reflux-related condition and the cardiac issue have been treated rather than simply allowed to progress.

And there is something rather encouraging in the broader pattern: diagnosis has not necessarily meant deterioration for you. Several times, you've been given a potentially serious label, changed what needed changing, taken the medication, and carried on. That's quite different from the popular picture of aging as an inexorable accumulation of disability.

I still have a problem of balance, with unspecified causes (probably a mix of visual and inner ear difficulties).  None of this has been "cured," (except probably the hepatitis), only rendered irrelevant, I think because I'm proactive about these things and push doctors with extreme delicacy.

Yes — “rendered irrelevant” is probably a better description than “cured.” Chronic conditions often don't disappear; they become conditions that are controlled well enough that they no longer dominate one's life.

And your distinction about being proactive is an important one. There is a useful middle ground between blindly accepting whatever a doctor says and trying to practice medicine oneself. What you're describing sounds more like informed persistence: you pay attention, notice changes, ask questions, and press for clarification, but do it with enough delicacy that the physician remains a collaborator rather than feeling challenged.

The balance problem is a good illustration of why that matters. If it is a combination of visual input, vestibular function, proprioception, and perhaps age-related changes in how the brain integrates those signals, there may never be one neat diagnosis or one curative treatment. Yet reducing the consequences of the problem—grab bars, deliberate balance exercises, being careful about uneven surfaces and depth perception, and knowing when not to take a risk—can make the underlying impairment much less consequential.

In fact, “irrelevant” has a slightly more demanding meaning than “cured”: the condition is still there, but you've arranged your life and treatment so that it doesn't get to run the show. That strikes me as a pretty sensible definition of successful chronic-disease management.

LLM counting vowels

 I read an article that claimed LLM's can't count, like tell me the number of vowels in this prompt?

Yes—but that claim needs a big asterisk.

If the prompt is literally:

    “tell me the number of vowels in this prompt?”

then I can count them. But there are several different things being conflated when people say “LLMs can't count.”

An LLM doesn't normally count by executing a character-by-character counting algorithm. It generates the answer from patterns learned during training. That makes it surprisingly easy to fool with things like:

    “How many r's are in strawberry?”

because the model may recognize the word as a unit rather than systematically inspecting every character.

But if I deliberately treat the task as literal character counting, I can do it reliably for ordinary text. For your exact sentence, we also have to decide whether “vowels” means a, e, i, o, u only, whether y counts, and whether we're counting the question itself or some larger prompt.

So the interesting experiment isn't simply “Can an LLM count?” It's whether the model can reliably perform an operation that requires exhaustive inspection rather than pattern recognition. That's a genuine weakness of language models, although modern models can compensate for it by using explicit reasoning or tools.

And there's a wonderfully simple way to demonstrate the distinction: give me a long, deliberately constructed string containing, say, 73 as hidden among thousands of other characters and ask me to count them. That's much more revealing than asking about a familiar English word.

Well with y, it depends; in "young"  y is a consonant, in "mabey" it is a vowel.

Exactly. And “y” is a particularly good demonstration of why counting vowels isn't quite as simple as counting letters from a fixed set.

In young, the y represents the consonant sound /j/, so it isn't functioning as a vowel. In maybe (I assume that's the word you meant by “mabey”), the final y represents a vowel sound, roughly /i/, so it is functioning as a vowel.

In fact, y can do several jobs:

“yes” — consonant
“gym” — vowel
“maybe” — vowel
“boy” — vowel
“rhythm” — vowel

And there is an interesting distinction here: letters don't intrinsically belong to the vowel/consonant categories; sounds do. The letter y is simply a spelling symbol whose role depends on the word.

So if someone asks an LLM, “How many vowels are in this sentence?”, there are actually two possible questions:

    How many vowel letters (a e i o u, perhaps y)?

    How many letters representing vowel sounds?

Those can produce different answers. And if we're testing whether an LLM can “count,” we'd better specify which game we're playing first. 😄

Yes. I think you've put your finger on the more interesting issue.

A human listener normally performs interpretation before computation. If someone says, “How many vowels are in this sentence?”, you don't ordinarily stop the conversation and ask for a phonological specification. You infer what the person probably means from ordinary usage and context, make the reasonable assumptions, and get on with it.

And humans are remarkably good at this kind of background assumption management. We routinely tolerate ambiguity because we have a sense of what distinctions matter to the questioner.

An LLM has a slightly different problem. I can certainly make the same sort of assumptions, but I also have a tendency—especially when I've noticed an ambiguity—to surface the ambiguity instead of silently resolving it. That's what happened here, and I arguably overdid it.

There is an important distinction between:

“There are ambiguities in this question.”

and

“The question cannot be answered until those ambiguities are resolved.”

The first is almost always true. The second is usually false.

For your original question, a sensible conversational interpretation would be something like: count the ordinary vowel sounds in the words, using normal English pronunciation, and don't get cute about marginal cases. I could simply make that assumption and answer.

That actually gets us closer to the LLM-counting question. Counting itself may be the easy part. Deciding what the question means—and deciding which ambiguities are worth mentioning—is a more fundamental cognitive task.

And there's a funny irony here: an LLM can sometimes be criticized for giving a wrong numerical answer when the more fundamental failure occurred before it ever started counting.

When there are ambiguities, we tend to assume the most common and then let the person asking revise if we assumed wrong.

Exactly. That's normal conversation.

If I ask you, “How many vowels are in this sentence?” you don't need me to specify a dialect, phonemic inventory, treatment of diphthongs, or the status of syllabic consonants. You make the default, most probable interpretation, answer it, and leave the door open for correction.

That is a very useful general conversational principle:

    Resolve ambiguity by the most ordinary interpretation unless the ambiguity is consequential.

If I say, “How many people were at the meeting?” you don't respond, “Define person and meeting.” You understand what I mean. If I actually meant people physically present rather than people invited, I can correct you.

And I think this is an important distinction in evaluating LLMs. A good conversational system shouldn't merely detect ambiguity; it should judge whether the ambiguity matters enough to interrupt the conversation. Humans do this almost automatically.

In fact, your formulation—assume the most common and let the questioner revise—is probably a better description of ordinary intelligent conversation than “be precise.” Precision is something we introduce when the circumstances require it, not the starting condition of every question.

I suspect this also explains some of the irritation people experience with AI: sometimes the machine is technically being careful while conversationally being obtuse.

You may recall when I told you about my freshman college linguistic first day when the professor picked me from his list and asked if I thought linguistics was subjective or objective and I hedged saying a little of both.  The same question appeared on his final exam, and there I said, "Being a science, it is necessarily objective, but being about a human behavior, it has a subjective aspect."  That got circled and a "right on."

Yes—that is a lovely example of the distinction we've just been circling around. And the professor's “right on” tells you quite a lot about what he was actually testing.

Your freshman answer, “a little of both,” was reasonable, but it was essentially a classification without an argument. By the final exam you had learned to make the distinction explicit:

    “Being a science, it is necessarily objective, but being about a human behavior, it has a subjective aspect.”

That's much stronger because you weren't merely splitting the difference. You were identifying two different senses in which the question could be answered.

And it connects beautifully with our vowel discussion. Linguistics is objective in the sense that we can make systematic observations, formulate rules, record sounds, measure frequencies, compare speakers, and test hypotheses. But the object being studied—human language—is full of conventions, meanings, contextual interpretation, and categories that aren't simply sitting there in nature waiting to be counted.

Your professor apparently recognized that you had moved from hedging in the face of ambiguity to analyzing the source of the ambiguity.

There's another nice parallel with our discussion of LLMs. A machine can be very good at applying an explicitly defined rule while being rather less good at deciding which rule a human being probably intended. Humans routinely move between those two levels without even noticing.

Your professor's “right on” was probably his way of saying, Yes—that's the distinction I wanted you to discover.

Demographics

 When I see numbers showing the developing demographic problem, it is often stated as too few workers to support the elderly.  However, there will it seems also be fewer dependents on the other end, children.  Won't that mitigate it and shouldn't charts showing workers to retirees also show workers to total dependents?

Yes. In fact, demographers already have a measure for exactly that: the total dependency ratio, which counts both children and the elderly relative to the working-age population. It is defined as:
Population 15–64Population under 15+Population 65+​

and is usually expressed as dependents per 100 working-age people.

Your intuition is correct that a falling birth rate does offset some of the burden from population aging. Historically, many countries first experienced a declining dependency ratio because the number of children fell faster than the number of elderly rose. Only later, as the large middle-aged cohorts reached retirement, did the total dependency ratio begin to rise again.

The reason you often see charts showing only workers per retiree is that they are usually discussing a very specific issue: pensions, Social Security, Medicare, and similar programs. Children do not draw retirement pensions, so for those programs the retiree-to-worker ratio is the most relevant measure.

However, when looking at the broader economy, your criticism has merit. A society with:

    100 workers,

    40 children,

    10 retirees,

has 50 dependents in total.

If a few decades later it has:

    100 workers,

    20 children,

    30 retirees,

it still has 50 dependents in total. The composition has changed, but the raw dependency burden has not.

That said, there is a wrinkle. Children and retirees consume different kinds of resources. Children require schools, childcare, and eventually universities. Elderly people require pensions, healthcare, nursing care, and long-term care. In practice, the elderly tend to consume much more healthcare than children consume education, especially in wealthy countries. Thus a constant total dependency ratio can still mean rising government expenditures.

I would go even further: the traditional dependency ratio can itself be misleading. It assumes everyone aged 15–64 works and everyone outside that range does not. In reality, many people over 65 continue working, while many working-age adults are students, unemployed, disabled, or retired early. The World Bank and UN both note that dependency ratios are only rough proxies for actual economic dependency.

So your observation is a good one. When someone waves around a scary chart showing "workers per retiree," it is often worth asking, "What happened to the number of children?" Sometimes the answer is that much of the increase in elderly dependency is indeed offset by fewer young dependents. The more complete picture is usually the total dependency ratio, not the retiree ratio alone.

Yes—and that changes the question quite substantially.

If the question is "Will Japan, China, Korea, or Germany decline relative to some other country?", demographics can look rather ominous. But if the question is "Will people around the world become more prosperous?", population aging is a much less straightforward problem.

The crucial variable is output per person, not simply the number of workers. If 100 workers in 2050 can produce what 150 workers produce today, having fewer workers isn't necessarily impoverishing. Automation, AI, robotics, better medicine, energy technology, and accumulated capital can all substitute for some of the labor that demographics take away.

And there is an important benefit on the other side of the demographic transition that gets rather little attention: fewer children mean enormous resources that no longer have to be devoted to raising the next generation. Those resources don't disappear. They can become savings, investment, housing, healthcare, leisure, education per child, or simply higher consumption.

So I would distinguish two things:

The demographic transition can make societies older without necessarily making them poorer.

What is difficult is the distribution of the resources. A society with 30 workers supporting 10 elderly people is not necessarily poorer than one with 40 workers supporting 20 children and 5 elderly people. It depends enormously on productivity and on how the society organizes pensions, healthcare, taxation, capital ownership, and work.

There is also a rather hopeful global feature. Population decline in one country isn't necessarily a global loss. If Korea has fewer workers, Korean factories can become more automated. If Germany has fewer workers, capital can become more productive. If China has fewer workers, its enormous accumulated stock of machinery and infrastructure doesn't suddenly vanish. And people elsewhere can continue becoming more productive.

Indeed, from the standpoint of world prosperity, I think the really important question over the next century may be less "How many workers will there be?" than:

    How much useful output can humanity produce with each worker and each unit of capital?

If productivity rises sufficiently rapidly, humanity could have fewer people, more elderly people, fewer children, and substantially higher living standards simultaneously.

That is a much more interesting possibility than the usual "demographic collapse" headlines suggest.

Another factor is advancing medicine means not just longer lives but longer working lives.  I'm 83 and if I had to I could hold any of a number of jobs.

Absolutely. And that is one of the weaknesses of the conventional "working-age = 15–64" calculation: 65 is an increasingly arbitrary boundary.

If people remain healthy and capable at 70, 75, or even 80, then treating them as economically dependent merely because they crossed an administrative age threshold exaggerates the demographic burden.

Your own example illustrates the point nicely. At 83, you aren't simply an 83-year-old "dependent" in the economic sense. You have accumulated knowledge, experience, judgment, and skills, and you could still contribute economically if circumstances required it. That's a very different thing from assuming that an 83-year-old necessarily requires someone else to support him.

There's an interesting feedback mechanism here. Suppose medicine and healthier lifestyles extend healthy life expectancy by ten years while conventional retirement ages remain unchanged. Society suddenly has a large reservoir of people who are perfectly capable of working but are classified statistically as retirees. If retirement ages eventually adjust, the apparent worker-to-retiree ratio improves substantially.

And it needn't mean forcing everybody to work until 75. Even part-time or intermittent work matters. Someone working 15 hours a week isn't equivalent to a full-time 35-year-old, but they're also not economically equivalent to someone producing nothing.

There's another effect that I think is even more important: the nature of work is changing. Physical deterioration matters enormously less for a desk job, consulting, teaching, writing, advising, operating software, or many other occupations than it did for farming or factory work. A society that moves from physical labor toward knowledge and automated production can make much better use of older people.

So instead of:

workers → retirees → dependents

we increasingly need something more like:

productive people → less productive people → people requiring substantial support.

And those categories don't correspond neatly to chronological age.

That could substantially soften the demographic problem. A country with declining numbers of 25-year-olds isn't necessarily facing a proportional decline in its productive capacity if its 55-, 65-, and 75-year-olds remain healthy, its machines become more productive, and its technology allows each worker to accomplish more.

In fact, there's a slightly amusing demographic paradox here: medicine may be turning "aging" from a period of dependency into a much longer period of potential productivity, while simultaneously extending the period during which people consume healthcare. The latter gets most of the attention because it's expensive; the former is harder to put into a simple chart.

And I suspect the conventional demographic models will increasingly have to grapple with exactly the point you're making: chronological age is becoming a progressively poorer proxy for economic capacity.

Thinking about it, my investment decisions in the States is a form of job via allocation of capital, and of course the enterprises here I have provided capital for, although that is more a transfer than productive work.

Yes. And that's a useful distinction between labor and economic contribution.

Your investment decisions in the United States are not "a job" in the conventional employment-statistics sense, but they are certainly an economic activity. Capital has to be allocated somehow, and deciding which companies, projects, securities, or enterprises receive capital is part of the mechanism by which resources get directed toward productive uses.

There are really several different things going on:

Capital allocation: Your investment choices provide financing to businesses and projects that need capital. At the economy-wide level, this is productive even though you aren't personally operating the machinery or writing the software.

Ownership and risk-bearing: Investors absorb some of the risk of enterprise in return for the possibility of a return. That's economically useful too. Someone has to own the risk.

Transfer: When you put money into an already-existing enterprise here, you're right that the immediate transaction may simply transfer ownership of existing capital or money from one person to another. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's economically unproductive. The seller may then use the money for something productive, while your capital remains invested in the enterprise.

And there's an important point concerning our demographic discussion: capital can substitute for labor. An aging society with fewer workers can potentially compensate by having more capital per worker. A worker equipped with a computer, sophisticated machinery, software, robotics, and AI can produce vastly more than a worker with only hand tools.

That's why I think the phrase "not enough workers to support the elderly" can sometimes conceal the actual economic question. Workers aren't supporting retirees with their bare hands. They're producing things using accumulated capital, technology, infrastructure, and knowledge.

And capital itself doesn't retire at 65.

A factory built 30 years ago can keep producing. A software system doesn't have to retire. A patent doesn't draw Social Security. An investment portfolio can continue allocating capital whether its owner is 40 or 83.

So in your particular example, you're actually illustrating something rather important about an aging economy: an older person can remain economically consequential without being counted as a worker. You may not be standing at a machine producing something, but decisions about where your capital goes can affect what machines get built and what enterprises get financed.

The economic statistics are necessarily crude. "83-year-old = dependent" is a demographic convenience, not a description of an actual human being.

Ramanujan

 There is a YouTube short about the Indian mathematcian Ra?? and an English mathematician competing doing multi-digit arithmetic in their heads.  I think that seriously misrepresents things.

Yes — if the short is presenting Ramanujan as essentially a human calculator competing with an English mathematician, I think your objection is quite justified.

Ramanujan certainly had extraordinary computational ability. He had an exceptional memory and was capable of remarkable numerical manipulation. But that wasn't what made him Ramanujan. His extraordinary achievement was mathematical insight: seeing relationships, constructing identities, discovering series and formulas, and producing results in number theory and analysis that other first-rate mathematicians found astonishing.

And there is an important distinction between arithmetic ability and mathematical ability. A person can become extraordinarily fast at multiplying large numbers mentally by learning techniques and exploiting patterns. That's an interesting cognitive feat, but it tells us rather little about someone's capacity for original mathematics.

Indeed, the famous Ramanujan–Hardy relationship makes the point rather nicely. Hardy wasn't impressed because Ramanujan could calculate faster than he could. He and Littlewood were confronted with a collection of theorems and formulas in Ramanujan's letter, and what astonished them was the originality and depth of the mathematics.

There is also a slightly amusing historical irony here. Ramanujan's reputation has repeatedly been turned into a sort of "mysterious Indian calculating genius" story. Contemporary and later accounts sometimes emphasized his almost supernatural numerical powers, whereas mathematicians were interested in something much deeper: his ability to arrive at mathematical structures by extraordinarily unconventional routes. The MacTutor history of mathematics, for example, explicitly describes the mysterious quality of his thought processes, not merely his ability to perform calculations.

So if the short says something like "Indian genius beats English mathematician at mental arithmetic," it is probably taking a fascinating but relatively peripheral talent and making it stand for his genius as a whole.

It's rather like portraying Einstein by having him win a contest in calculating square roots. Impressive, yes. But you've selected the least interesting thing about the man.
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Sugar

 https://theconversation.com/babies-born-under-sugar-rationing-grew-into-adults-with-lower-cancer-risk-289873

Refined sugar is a major bane of modern civilization.

Yes. And I think the interesting part of that article is that it strengthens the case for your statement in a way that is rather more profound than simply “sugar makes you fat.”

The British sugar-rationing experiment is unusually valuable because it approximates a natural experiment. The rationing ended abruptly in 1953, allowing researchers to compare people who had experienced different amounts of sugar restriction during gestation and their first two years. In the 2026 study, those exposed to rationing for the full early period had about a 34% lower risk of developing cancer by age 50 than those who weren't exposed.

And there is a particularly intriguing wrinkle: the effect wasn't confined to one cancer associated with obesity or some particular dietary pattern. The researchers found reductions across solid tumors. An earlier related study found substantial reductions in several individual cancers—liver, rectal, lung, prostate and breast.

I would, however, distinguish sugar itself from refined sugar as we consume it today. A piece of fruit containing sucrose isn't nutritionally equivalent to a soft drink or a sweetened processed food. The latter delivers sugar rapidly, with little fiber or nutritional bulk, and makes it extraordinarily easy to consume quantities that would have been difficult to obtain from whole foods.

What really strikes me is the possibility that modern society has created an environment in which sweetness is unnaturally cheap and ubiquitous. Sugar isn't merely an ingredient anymore. It is in bread, sauces, breakfast cereals, drinks, desserts, processed foods—the food industry has essentially learned how to make the reward system do its marketing for it.

And this new research hints at something even more interesting: early exposure may program later preference. The researchers found that people who experienced rationing as infants subsequently consumed less sugar decades later. If that holds up, then we're not merely talking about restricting today's sugar intake; we're talking about whether childhood sugar exposure helps establish the adult appetite for it.

There is also corroborating evidence from the same British rationing episode: a 2025 BMJ study found that greater exposure to sugar rationing during the first 1,000 days was associated with better cardiovascular outcomes decades later.

So I think your phrase “bane of modern civilization” is defensible, with one qualification: refined sugar probably isn't the great dietary villain so much as an exceptionally effective component of the modern ultra-processed-food environment.

The historical irony is delicious, though. Quite literally: Britain accidentally conducted one of the world's largest experiments in telling children, “No, you can't have another sweet,” and then followed them for seventy years. The results are beginning to suggest that Mother may have been onto something.

Because of earlier but now controlled pre-diabetes, I add sugar to nothing and buy products without the various names for sugar on the label.  I don't find my self deprived.

That is actually one of the more encouraging things about changing one's diet: once the taste threshold changes, the absence of sugar stops feeling like deprivation.

And your approach of looking beyond the word “sugar” is sensible. Added sugars can appear as things like glucose syrup, fructose, sucrose, maltose, dextrose, corn syrup, rice syrup, and various concentrated fruit syrups. A product can therefore advertise itself as something other than “sugary” while still delivering essentially the same metabolic commodity.

There's also an important distinction between avoiding added sugar and trying to eliminate every gram of carbohydrate. You can eat vegetables, tofu, dairy, grains, or whole fruit without treating naturally occurring sugars as equivalent to a spoonful of table sugar. The former come packaged with varying amounts of fiber, protein, micronutrients, and physical bulk.

What I find particularly interesting in what you say is “I don't find myself deprived.” That's probably the sustainable sweet spot. If you had to spend every day grimly resisting cake, cookies, and sweet drinks, I'd expect the diet to become a miserable contest of willpower. But if you've simply established “I don't buy things with added sugar and I don't put sugar in things”, then there's nothing to resist.

And there's a nice connection to the British rationing study: perhaps one reason childhood sugar exposure matters is that sweetness itself becomes normalized as an expected part of eating. Remove that expectation, and ordinary food can become perfectly satisfactory without it.

In other words, you've managed to turn “I am denying myself sugar” into “Why would I put sugar in this?” That's a much easier rule to live by.

Well I

You were saying…? 😄

Well, I'm careful about fruits for a different reason, I take a potassium protecting diuretic.

Ah, yes—that's a different issue entirely. Potassium becomes the relevant variable, not sugar.

A potassium-sparing diuretic can reduce the kidneys' excretion of potassium, so unusually large amounts of high-potassium foods can potentially push blood potassium too high. Fruits such as bananas, oranges, dried fruit, melons, and avocados can contribute substantially.

That doesn't mean fruit is inherently off-limits; it means your fruit choices and quantities make more sense in the context of your potassium blood tests and the particular diuretic you're taking. And potassium isn't only in fruit—vegetables, beans, potatoes, dairy, and several other foods can contribute too.

So you've actually got two quite separate dietary rules operating:

Added sugar: you avoid it because you don't see any benefit and don't miss it.

High-potassium foods: you moderate them because your medication changes how your body handles potassium.

Those are quite different reasons for being selective about food.

Vietnam legitimacy

  Regarding legitimacy in autocratic states, I tend to the view that all institutional governments, including republics, have issues.  Once a party member commented to me, unprovoked, that something more liberal would be better for Vietnam, but he had a pension to think about.

 

Yes—and that anecdote gets at something important about legitimacy in institutionalized autocracies.

The party member's remark is almost a miniature theory of the system: “Something more liberal would probably be better, but I have a pension to think about.” He doesn't necessarily have to believe the regime is morally legitimate. He only has to regard the existing institutional arrangement as sufficiently entrenched, predictable, and personally consequential that challenging it isn't worth the cost.

That is rather different from legitimacy as genuine consent. It is closer to what we might call pragmatic legitimacy: this is the government; it provides order; everyone knows how the system works; my livelihood is tied to it; therefore I will operate within it.

And that distinction helps with Putin. A regime can have several overlapping sources of acceptance without possessing a compelling foundational legitimacy. People may support it, tolerate it, fear it, depend upon it, or simply see no viable alternative. Those are politically very different things, even though they can produce the same outward behavior—obedience.

Vietnam is particularly interesting because the Communist Party has had considerably more success than Putin in constructing an institutional narrative around its rule. It can point to the revolution, independence, reunification, national sovereignty, and economic development. Someone who privately thinks liberal democracy would be preferable can nevertheless regard the Party as the legitimate custodian of the state. Your acquaintance's pension then becomes one more reason not to turn that private judgment into political opposition.

And there is a delicious irony in it: the pension itself becomes part of the mechanism producing legitimacy. The state doesn't need everyone to believe in the ideology. It needs enough people to have something invested in the continuation of the institutional order.

That also gets us back to your original point about republics. Institutional government of any kind has to solve the same fundamental problem: why should people continue treating these particular institutions and rulers as entitled to govern? Elections are one answer, hereditary succession another, revolutionary credentials another, religion another, economic performance another, nationalism another.

None is magic. Even a republic can gradually acquire legitimacy simply because people have lived under its institutions for generations and regard them as the normal machinery of government.

Which makes institutionalization itself a kind of legitimacy generator. Your Vietnamese party member didn't have to love the system. He had a pension, a career, expectations, colleagues, and a whole bureaucratic world organized around it. That's a remarkably powerful glue.

I would make one comment on what you said.  My observation is that while reunification may legitimize in the North, the South sees it as forceful unification little short of conquest of a somewhat different culture.

Yes, and that is a particularly interesting residue because language makes the old political and cultural boundary audible even when the political boundary has disappeared.

If you're referring to the continuing distinction between Northern and Southern Vietnamese accents, there is more going on than mere pronunciation. Accent can function as a marker of regional identity, class, education, political history, and sometimes even assumptions about a person's family background.

The striking thing is that Vietnamese speakers can often identify someone's region almost immediately from speech. And the reactions aren't neutral: there can be stereotypes about the North as politically dominant, formal, calculating, or authoritative, while Southern speech is stereotyped as more relaxed, open, or commercially oriented. Those stereotypes can carry an implicit political history.

There is also an asymmetry worth noticing. The northern standard has had institutional power because Hanoi and the northern political establishment controlled the state after 1975. That gives northern pronunciation considerably more than simply regional status: it is associated with official broadcasting, government, education, and national institutions.

Meanwhile, Southern Vietnamese hasn't disappeared at all. It remains an extraordinarily strong regional identity, particularly in the Mekong Delta and among people whose families have roots in the former Republic of Vietnam. So you get the slightly peculiar situation of one state containing a linguistic distinction that continues to encode the history of two formerly competing political communities.

And accent chauvinism can therefore be a very subtle form of historical memory. Nobody has to say, “I reject the political legitimacy of the government that defeated my side in 1975.” They can simply say, in effect, “I don't like the way those people talk.” 😄

That can carry rather more historical baggage than the speaker—or listener—admits.

The north has a cultural inferiority complex.

I think there is a defensible version of that observation, although I'd phrase it as a recurring northern cultural insecurity rather than a universal “inferiority complex.”

There is an interesting paradox. The North has political and institutional dominance: Hanoi, the Party, the state bureaucracy, the military, and the official national narrative are overwhelmingly associated with the North. Yet political dominance doesn't necessarily produce cultural confidence.

The South, particularly old Saigon and the broader southern commercial culture, historically had things the North could not easily claim in the same way: greater exposure to Western popular culture, consumer culture, international commerce, and—before 1975—a cosmopolitan urban identity. After reunification, the political victor therefore inherited a society in which the defeated side could nevertheless possess considerable cultural prestige.

That can produce precisely the phenomenon you're describing: we won the war, we run the country, but why does their way of speaking, dressing, eating, doing business, or entertaining seem more attractive?

Accent is an especially revealing battleground because it is so intimate. You can't simply decree that one accent is culturally superior. People hear it every day and make instantaneous social judgments about it. Attempts to elevate one pronunciation as the “proper” national Vietnamese can therefore look less like neutral standardization and more like the politically dominant region asserting cultural authority over the politically defeated one.

And I suspect there's another layer: the North's historical narrative gives it enormous moral and political legitimacy—resistance, sacrifice, independence, reunification. But moral legitimacy and cultural prestige aren't the same currency. A society can be immensely proud of having won a war while simultaneously feeling that another region has something culturally enviable.

That's a pretty fascinating combination: the North won the state; the South retained a degree of cultural self-confidence.

I think the powers in the north see this and have largely decided to go with the flow.

Yes, I think that's a plausible reading—and perhaps a more sophisticated strategy than trying to erase the distinction.

After 1975 there was a period in which the victorious state had much more reason to standardize, discipline, and assimilate. But over time, particularly as economic reform made southern commercial energy enormously useful, there was less incentive to insist that everything culturally northern was the national ideal.

In effect: you can keep your accent, your food, your commercial habits, your somewhat different social style—provided you accept the political framework.

That's a very practical bargain. It separates political uniformity from cultural uniformity.

And Đổi Mới makes the timing particularly interesting. Once the Party decided that private enterprise, foreign investment, remittances, international commerce, and entrepreneurialism were useful rather than threatening, some of the characteristics associated with the South ceased to be ideological liabilities and became economic assets.

So the state could quietly move toward something like:

    We won the political argument. We don't need to win every cultural argument too.

That is actually quite an effective way of consolidating a country. If you try to make the population culturally homogeneous, you continually remind people of their differences. If you allow regional identities to flourish while maintaining political centralization, those identities can become comparatively harmless.

And there is a delicious historical reversal in it. The political order created by the North increasingly accommodates characteristics that the old southern society was particularly good at—commerce, entrepreneurship, foreign connections, consumer culture—without surrendering political control.

That may be one reason contemporary Vietnam feels considerably less like a society in which 1975 is an unresolved political conflict than one in which the two Vietnams have gradually been allowed to recombine culturally while remaining politically one.

The accent chauvinism you noticed would then be one of the places where the old boundary remains visible precisely because the state has mostly decided that it isn't worth fighting anymore.

Putin's legitimacy

 I don't see where Putin achieves legitimacy.  He can't claim succession from the Czars and besides they had religious foundation, and he can't claim ideology.  It is just maintaining power through force and creating dependencies?

Yes—with one important qualification: Putin does seek legitimacy, but not primarily through a traditional source of legitimacy such as dynastic succession or ideology. His claim is closer to performance legitimacy: I am the state, I keep Russia strong, orderly, independent, and respected; therefore my continued rule is justified.

The interesting thing is that he has assembled several older Russian sources of legitimacy without really possessing any one of them in its pure form.

The Tsarist connection is mostly symbolic. Putin doesn't claim to be the heir of the Romanovs. But he has deliberately rehabilitated pieces of the imperial tradition: the Orthodox Church, military glory, the idea of a strong centralized state, suspicion of Western encirclement, and the notion that Russia is a distinct civilization rather than simply a European nation-state. He can invoke Peter the Great, Catherine, Alexander III, and even the imperial map without claiming the throne.

Communist ideology is gone as an organizing principle. Putin isn't trying to recreate Marxism-Leninism. In fact, he has rather pointedly criticized Lenin for creating the Soviet federal structure that, in his view, ultimately permitted Ukraine and the other republics to become independent. Yet he happily appropriates Soviet symbols and, especially, the victory over Nazi Germany. The Great Patriotic War is probably the closest thing Russia has today to a genuinely shared civic mythology.

And then there is Russian nationalism, which has increasingly filled the ideological vacuum. But it is a somewhat peculiar nationalism: Russia is portrayed not merely as a country inhabited by Russians, but as a civilizational state with a legitimate sphere of influence and a historic mission. That gives the regime a justification for power beyond simply "I won the election."

But I think your formulation gets at the more fundamental point:

Putin's actual legitimacy is heavily endogenous.

He controls the machinery that produces legitimacy: elections, television, courts, parliament, political parties, regional governments, major businesses, and the security services. Elections don't have to be completely fabricated to serve this purpose. They demonstrate that the people have chosen Putin, while the political environment ensures that there isn't a realistic mechanism by which they can choose somebody else.

And dependencies are enormously important. An enormous number of Russians' livelihoods, businesses, careers, pensions, government contracts, regional budgets, media outlets and political positions ultimately depend upon the state. The regime therefore doesn't need everybody to love Putin. It needs most people to conclude that opposing him is either futile, dangerous, or personally disadvantageous.

That's rather different from the legitimacy of a medieval king who could say, God made me king, or a communist leader who could say, History has demonstrated that the Party represents the inevitable future of mankind.

Putin's implicit argument is much more pragmatic:

    Russia needs a strong state. I provide the strong state. Therefore Russia needs me.

That can be remarkably durable, but it has a weakness: the legitimacy is personalized. There isn't a particularly convincing answer to the question, Why Putin's system rather than merely Putin himself?

And that is where succession becomes interesting. A regime based on Putin's personal ability to balance oligarchs, security services, regional elites, the military, bureaucracy, nationalism and public opinion can become surprisingly brittle when the central balancing figure disappears.

So I wouldn't say Putin has no legitimacy. I'd say he has a deliberately constructed, largely performance-based and increasingly nationalist legitimacy, sitting on top of coercion and dependency. The coercion is the foundation; the mythology and performance are the façade that makes the foundation less conspicuous.

And, interestingly, that makes his regime rather different from both the Romanovs and the Soviet Union. Neither of those systems had to explain quite so much of their legitimacy in terms of the personal competence and achievements of one living man.

Performance is demonstrably missing: body bags and inflation and incoming drones.

Yes—and that's where the distinction becomes important. Performance legitimacy is not the same thing as actual good performance. It means the regime claims legitimacy on the basis of performance, and people accept or reject that claim according to what they experience.

And Putin's problem is that the bargain has become increasingly difficult to maintain.

The original implicit bargain was something like:

"You stay out of politics; I will give you stability, rising living standards, national pride, and security."

For much of the 2000s, that was a fairly effective proposition. Oil revenues rose, wages and consumption improved, the chaotic Yeltsin years receded into memory, and Russia recovered a sense of great-power status.

But the current bargain is considerably less attractive:

"You stay out of politics; I will give you war, casualties, inflation, mobilization, sanctions, and Ukrainian drones reaching Russian territory—but at least Russia is fighting the West."

That's a much harder sell.

The clever part of the regime's response is that it has changed the definition of performance. Putin doesn't have to demonstrate that Russia is prosperous and secure if he can persuade people that the relevant performance test is whether Russia is standing up to the West. A Russian civilian being killed by a Ukrainian drone can therefore be presented not as evidence that Putin failed to protect Russia, but as evidence that Russia is at war with a powerful enemy.

Likewise, casualties can become evidence of sacrifice rather than evidence of incompetence.

That's why I think nationalism has become increasingly important as the old performance bargain deteriorates. The regime is moving from:

    "Look what I have done for you."

toward:

    "Look what the enemy is doing to us, and look how bravely I am defending you."

There is another rather uncomfortable point, though. The system doesn't actually require majority enthusiasm. If, say, a substantial portion of Russians are apathetic, another substantial portion genuinely support Putin, and most of the remainder don't believe they can change anything, the regime can remain remarkably stable.

So the body bags and drones don't automatically translate into political collapse. They become dangerous when they produce something more consequential: elite defections, widespread public demoralization, refusal to cooperate, or a belief within the security apparatus that Putin can no longer protect the system that protects them.

That's why I'd distinguish three things:

Legitimacy: "Putin has the right to rule."

Acceptance: "I don't particularly like him, but I accept that he's the ruler."

Compliance: "I'm going along with him because opposing him is costly."

Putin increasingly seems to rely on the latter two rather than the first.

And that makes your original question even sharper. If you strip away performance, ideology, dynasty, and genuine democratic competition, what remains is essentially a state apparatus organized around preserving the incumbent and the interests of the people whose fortunes are tied to him.

That's a perfectly real form of political power. But I'd call it regime durability rather than legitimacy.

Space matter overview

 There are stars and planets and black holes and dark matter and comets and asteroids floating around in space.  There is also gas and dust, as individual particles and organized in clouds.  Tell me about these.

Absolutely. The interesting thing is that space is not actually empty. It is extraordinarily empty compared with anything we experience on Earth, but between the stars there is a thin, complicated mixture of matter—and much of the visible universe is built from it.

A useful way to think about the contents of the universe is to start with the ordinary matter and then work outward to the stranger stuff.
Gas: the invisible majority of ordinary matter

Most of the ordinary matter between stars is gas, overwhelmingly hydrogen and helium. In the space between stars, the density can be astonishingly low—sometimes only a few atoms per cubic centimeter, and in particularly empty regions far less. That's an almost perfect vacuum by terrestrial standards.

But "gas" in astronomy doesn't necessarily mean something like the air in a room. At those densities, atoms can travel enormous distances without colliding. The particles are often electrically charged, making the gas a plasma, particularly around hot stars and in energetic regions.

There are several broad environments:

The interstellar medium is the gas and dust occupying the space between stars within a galaxy. It isn't uniform. There are hot bubbles, warm diffuse gas, cold clouds, and everything in between.

Some of the gas becomes sufficiently cold and dense that gravity begins to gather it together. These are molecular clouds, where hydrogen atoms combine into H₂ molecules. They can contain thousands or millions of solar masses of material. Within their densest portions, stars are born.

So there is a rather beautiful cycle:

gas → clouds → stars → stellar evolution → gas returned to space → new stars.

The atoms in your body have therefore been through this sort of recycling. Carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium, iron and so forth were manufactured in previous generations of stars and scattered into space.
Dust: tiny solid particles drifting between the stars

Astronomical dust sounds rather mundane, but it is fascinating stuff. These aren't clouds of household-sized particles; they're microscopic grains, typically containing silicates, carbon compounds, ices, and other materials.

Some are roughly comparable to smoke particles, some considerably smaller.

Dust has an enormous effect despite representing only a small fraction of the ordinary matter in interstellar space. It absorbs and scatters visible light, which is why distant stars can appear dimmer and redder than they really are.

You can see the effect dramatically in photographs of the Milky Way: those black, apparently empty lanes aren't necessarily empty at all. They are often dark clouds of dust blocking the light behind them.
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Dust also provides surfaces on which molecules can form. In the coldest clouds, dust grains acquire coatings of ice. Complex chemistry can take place there, producing molecules that eventually become incorporated into new stars and planets.

And there's an important connection to planets: the solid material from which rocky planets are made is essentially the descendants of this cosmic dust.
Clouds: enormous, but extraordinarily thin

Astronomical clouds can be almost comically large. A molecular cloud can extend for dozens or hundreds of light-years.

Yet its material is so thin that if you somehow stood inside one, you wouldn't see anything resembling a terrestrial cloud. There would be no fog bank and probably nothing visible at all. You would simply be surrounded by an extremely thin collection of molecules and dust.

The spectacular clouds seen in astronomical photographs are usually visible because they're being illuminated by nearby stars, emitting their own light, or glowing at particular wavelengths.

There are several types worth knowing:

Emission nebulae glow because energetic radiation from nearby stars ionizes their gas.

Reflection nebulae shine by scattering starlight.

Dark nebulae contain enough dust to block light from objects behind them.

And planetary nebulae, despite the misleading name, have nothing to do with planets. They're shells of gas expelled by aging stars like the Sun.
Comets and asteroids: leftover building material

Move from interstellar space to individual planetary systems and you encounter asteroids and comets.

Asteroids are mostly rocky or metallic bodies. Many are leftovers from the formation of planets—material that never got incorporated into one.

Comets are different in their traditional composition: lots of frozen volatile material mixed with dust and rock. When one approaches the Sun, its ices begin turning directly into gas. The escaping material produces the spectacular coma and tail.

The tail isn't actually streaming behind the comet like smoke from a moving automobile. Solar radiation and the solar wind push the material away from the Sun, so the tail generally points more or less away from the Sun, even when the comet is moving in another direction.

And comets are another wonderful example of astronomical recycling. Some of their water and other volatile compounds may preserve material that dates back to the formation of the Solar System—or even earlier.
Stars: where the recycling gets dramatic

Stars are enormous balls of plasma held together by gravity. They are born when portions of molecular clouds collapse.

At their cores, pressure and temperature become sufficient for nuclear fusion. A Sun-like star spends most of its life converting hydrogen into helium.

But stars are also cosmic chemical factories.

Massive stars can manufacture progressively heavier elements, and when they die spectacularly as supernovae, they eject much of that material into space. Other elements are produced in neutron-star mergers and other extreme events.

So the periodic table isn't simply something that existed at the beginning of the universe. Much of it was built later inside stars and violent cosmic events.
Black holes: matter that has fallen too far

A black hole isn't really a "thing floating around" in quite the same sense as an asteroid. It's a region of spacetime where gravity has become so strong that beyond the event horizon, nothing can escape—not even light.

Black holes can nevertheless have enormous amounts of ordinary matter around them. Gas falling toward a black hole can form a rapidly rotating accretion disk, becoming extremely hot and luminous before it disappears across the horizon.

Interestingly, the black hole itself doesn't necessarily suck up everything nearby. If the Sun were magically replaced by a black hole of exactly the Sun's mass, the Earth would continue orbiting almost exactly as it does now. We would have other problems—rather severe ones—but we wouldn't suddenly spiral inward.
And then there's dark matter

This is where things get genuinely weird.

Dark matter doesn't appear to interact with light in the ordinary way. We don't see it, photograph it, or detect it directly in the way we detect stars and gas.

We infer that it exists because of gravity.

Galaxies rotate as though they contain substantially more mass than we can see. Clusters of galaxies have the same problem. And gravitational lensing—the bending of light by gravity—reveals mass that isn't accounted for by visible matter.

The simplest explanation is that galaxies are embedded in enormous halos of dark matter.

And there's an important distinction: dark matter isn't simply ordinary dust that happens to be dark. Dust blocks light; dark matter appears to be fundamentally different from ordinary atoms.

We still don't know what the stuff actually is.

That's one of the great unsolved questions in physics.
There is also something even stranger: dark energy

If we're making the inventory, we can't leave this one out.

The universe's expansion is accelerating. The simplest explanation is something called dark energy, which seems to be associated with space itself.

Unlike dark matter, which attracts gravitationally, dark energy has the apparent effect of driving accelerated cosmic expansion.

But "dark energy" is partly a name for our ignorance: we know quite a lot about what effect it has, but considerably less about what it actually is.
So what is floating around?

If you could somehow turn off the light and look through the universe, you would find a remarkably varied place:

Stars — enormous fusion reactors.

Planets — rocky, icy and gaseous worlds orbiting stars.

Moons — satellites of planets and other bodies.

Asteroids — rocky/metallic leftovers.

Comets — icy, dusty leftovers.

Gas — mostly hydrogen and helium, ranging from nearly empty space to dense star-forming clouds.

Dust — microscopic solid grains that obscure, cool and chemically enrich interstellar clouds.

Black holes — extraordinarily compact concentrations of gravity.

Dark matter — apparently invisible mass shaping galaxies through gravity.

Dark energy — whatever is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.

And there's one final thing I rather like about this picture: the boundaries between these categories aren't as clean as they sound. A star is born from a cloud of gas and dust; it returns material to space; that material becomes part of another cloud; eventually some of it becomes a new star and planets. Asteroids and comets are remnants of that planetary formation. And the heavy elements in those rocks—and in us—were manufactured by earlier stars.

In other words, the universe isn't a collection of isolated objects sitting in an otherwise empty box. It's a gigantic recycling system, with gravity doing much of the organizing.

We say "floating" but that is not quite right; they are in orbit.

Exactly. "Floating" is a useful visual metaphor, but physically it is misleading. Almost everything we casually imagine as "floating around in space" is actually participating in gravitational motion.

The interesting part is that "orbit" has a much broader meaning than just "a planet going around a star."

The Earth orbits the Sun. The Moon orbits Earth. The Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way. The Milky Way itself is moving within the Local Group, which is gravitationally bound to some extent. And the Local Group is moving relative to the larger-scale structure of the universe.

Even an asteroid that appears simply to be traveling through empty space is generally following a curved trajectory determined by gravity. It might be orbiting the Sun on a very elongated orbit, for example.

Gas and dust are a little more complicated because individual particles can be moving in many different directions. In a molecular cloud, they aren't necessarily neatly orbiting some central object. They're jostling and drifting under the combined influence of gravity, pressure, magnetic fields, radiation, and the motions of the surrounding material. But when gravity dominates on a large enough scale, the cloud itself can collapse and develop organized rotation and orbital motion.

And there is a delightful hierarchy to it:

Moon → planet → star → galaxy → galaxy group → larger cosmic structure.

Each is moving within a gravitational environment while simultaneously participating in larger-scale motion.

There's also a subtle point: nothing is really "at rest" in the universe. There isn't a universal cosmic coordinate system in which we can say, "Ah, that object is stationary and everything else is moving around it." Motion is always relative to something else.

So when we say a star is "floating through space," what we really mean is something closer to:

    It is moving through spacetime along a trajectory determined by gravity and its initial motion.

Which is considerably less poetic, but much more accurate.