■ For example, it’s not necessarily intuitive that Seoul is only 200 to 250 miles from two different sites in mainland China, and only about 400 miles from the nearest part of Russia. Shenyang, a Chinese city of 9 million people, is 350 miles away (as the crow flies), and Beijing is just shy of 600 miles in the distance.

■ These are, in modern terms, very short distances. From New York to Washington, DC, is just a little more than 200 miles. Los Angeles to San Francisco is about 350 miles. Chicago to Fargo is, like Beijing to Seoul, only about a 600-mile hop. All are distances easily crossed by airplanes in times measurable more precisely in minutes than hours.

■ Among many potential nightmare scenarios for our future is this: Driven by irrational motives, North Korea launches an invasion of South Korea. The invasion itself doesn’t have to be successful for China to step in, declaring the region to be within its “sphere of influence”, and asserting dominance over North Korea. China has been propping up North Korea economically for some time, so it’s not unreasonable to imagine a domineering reaction. (All this, of course, involving multiple parties with nuclear weapons.)

■ What stops China from going farther than the DMZ? The deterrent effect of America’s very real and tangible defensive alliance with South Korea. But deterrence depends upon credibility, and that credibility has taken a sudden and serious hit. So serious, in fact, that South Korea’s president promptly reiterated a call for greater domestic control of its defense forces than the country has had since the 1950s.

■ Alliances should never be taken lightly. It’s not cheap to maintain an overseas presence the way the United States does in South Korea, but the cost of prevention should never be examined in isolation. What always matters is the cost (whether potential or likely) of what’s being prevented.

■ Desalination plants have been targeted in the Middle East. Russia has drained reservoirs and viciously attacked freshwater infrastructure in its war against Ukraine. Cyberattacks have gone after Canadian and American water systems.

■ The problem on the global scale isn’t exactly one of simple water scarcity. It’s more a problem of supply and transportation, getting the right types of water to where it’s needed and away from where it’s not, and the needs may vary considerably within a short period of time.

■ Almost no culture on Earth has better claim to that kind of knowledge than the Dutch, and their present condition may be illustrative. Low-lying Holland no longer just needs to pump water out, it also needs to be able to combat drought, which is a condition without vast historical precedent that is becoming more common.

■ This should alarm us and be a call to action. If even the Netherlands is having to reassess the meaning of water security (from too much to too little), a similar reassessment is going to be a matter for everyone, worldwide.

■ Social conditions like crew morale may be mostly subjective, but it’s objectively true that the aircraft carrier has been deployed for more than eight months, longer by a quarter of a year than originally anticipated.

■ Everyone’s choices are bounded, in part, by the appeal and availability of alternatives. The people on board an American aircraft carrier are specialists and technicians, not mere drones (in the sense of bees, not UAVs). They are the products of a sophisticated, all-volunteer military force in a technologically advanced age. They are people with other options.

■ Of course, part of the promise of service in the military is fair pay and transferable career skills. But, even more than that, we implicitly promise character: That a veteran with an honorable discharge leaves with more character than the newly enlisted or commissioned recruit. But character isn’t a one-way projection. It acts as a mirror, reflected off the surrounding people and environment.

■ If we want an honorable fighting force, high-quality recruits, and an effective defensive shield in a world of ambitious adversaries, then we (through our elected officials) have to ensure that both environment and leadership rise to the level that will form the right outcomes. If those fall short, then it’s imperative to change course before it’s too late.

■ This means we should not be surprised when they act in ways that cause problems, break rules, or appear immoral: There doesn’t appear to be any effort to impose moral training on them, so they behave as though they have unrelenting task focus. This is a problem, because people are all too often anthropomorphizing them -- treating “Claude” and “Gemini” and their ilk like they might treat people of the same names, as sentient beings.

■ And that’s a very big problem for a reason also highlighted by Wired: “AI agents do not learn the kind of moral reasoning exhibited by even small children.” We expect sentient beings to have feelings and moral capacities: Who hasn’t seen a dog with a guilty look? (Even that look, though, is more a biological instinct than evidence of moral reasoning.)

■ We need a great deal more habituation around drawing boundaries around our expectations of technology, as well as our expectations of the people furnishing that technology. Thinking of an AI agent as a pal with a given name instead of the product manufactured (however digitally) by a business with consumer-safety responsibilities is a huge mistake. The computers don’t have souls, but people who do have them need to know better.

■ A writer at Axios has taken to extolling the virtues of AI as a “reading buddy” that makes it easier to process “the way many of us actually read books”. Behold, says the writer: AI can “keep track of plots and characters”.

■ The overreaching for meaning is painful. Sure, you can ask AI to generate a cast of characters or a plot summary -- but for most widely-read books, one already exists on Wikipedia or in another reference somewhere. The Book of Ecclesiastes gets it right: “What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done. Nothing is new under the sun!”

■ The Axios way of reporting -- what they have trademarked as “Smart Brevity” -- both attempts to make these old practices sound new and offers a prime example of the error itself. It is nothing new to suggest that writers ought to get to the point: Clear, crisp, memorable writing has been celebrated since long before Ben Franklin started printing punchy aphorisms.

■ Nor is the value of good layout anything new. Axios really just follows two classic rules. Rule #1: Keep columns of text narrow and space the lines generously. Newspapers and magazines have followed these principles for many, many decades. Line spacing even has the lovely trade jargon “leading”, based on the strips of lead once used to separate lines of type.

■ Rule #2: Give the eye convenient anchoring points. (This is why people like bullet lists!) There’s nothing new about this, either: Old books are full of initials, pilcrows, numbered paragraphs, and other eye-catching wayfinding marks.

■ If you’re finding it hard to read a book, especially if it’s a well-regarded piece of time-honored literature, then there’s a non-zero chance that it’s the fault of sloppy layout or lazy typography. None of this is new and none of it is solved by adopting an AI reading buddy. It’s solved by attention to detail and perhaps a dose of reader self-discipline.

■ In and of itself, the decline is not necessarily a cause for alarm. The reserve is supposed to cover 90 days’ worth of imports, and for the last five or six years, the US has been a net petroleum exporter -- a situation that was basically unimaginable when the Strategic Petroleum Reserve was created in 1975. But with the war between the US and Iran continuing its unsteady path and the hostilities around the Strait of Hormuz specifically disrupting a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade, it’s a time to be alert to uncertainties and contingencies.

■ The United States has, for instance, an enormous nuclear-powered fleet of submarines and aircraft carriers. But the US Navy has about 150 non-nuclear combat surface ships. They don’t run on coal, and they aren’t sailboats, either: They need petroleum-based fuels.

■ The Naval Petroleum Reserves have been fully divested for years, and though ongoing domestic production of petroleum is strong, what would happen if we simultaneously experienced a global supply crunch (like the current one) and a significant naval conflict (like an abrupt invasionary expedition in the South China Sea)?

■ Even if the Strategic Petroleum Reserve isn’t primarily intended to serve a strategic defense purpose, it still sends a bad signal about readiness when we run low on both petroleum reserves and reserves of munitions at the same time. An enormous factor in conflict deterrence is credibility, and it’s a lot easier to be credible when a seemingly inexhaustible supply of resources stands ready.

■ Our behavior may be sending highly undesirable signals to the rest of the world, and those signals run the risk of inviting adversarial behavior that benefits nobody in the long run. We should heed the advice of Dwight Eisenhower: “[A]s long as there persists a threat to freedom, [free nations] must, at any cost, remain armed, strong, and ready for the risk of war.”

■ There’s good reason for college athletics to exist as a common practice, of course: It provides a common base for entertainment, offers publicity to colleges, gives alumni a reason to feel bound to the alma mater, and (theoretically, at least) encourages the formation of a well-rounded person.

■ But these things are also not exclusive to athletics; collegiate notoriety and common cause can be found in the arts, social events, publications, community service, and academics. As with all such things, balance is essential.

■ It’s hard not to see certain expenses as outliers, as when the report notes, “The 14 highest spending Power colleges each spent more than $38 million on coaching.” That’s a lot of money to spend on management for a pursuit with wildly uncertain returns on investment and a very high rate of unprofitability.

■ Much like the case with economic-development spending, it’s hard for any individual institution to opt out of the practice of high spending on athletics, no matter how irrational the behavior might be. It’s a real collective-action problem: Nobody has the incentive to rationalize those budgets if it would mean taking the risk of irritating alumni and others by under-performing on the field of play. But it would still make sense for cooler heads to weigh in before the subject becomes yet another matter for overheated political rhetoric.

■ Perhaps not, though. No matter how efficient German anti-terrorism units may be, the drone was rigged with explosives. The German interior minister says it wasn’t the work of amateurs, and it represents “a new threat scenario”. The situation appears to be one of a sophisticated adversary bringing tools of warfare deep into Europe.

■ The weapon was found next to a Ukrainian aircraft, which is almost certainly more than just a chance coincidence. It is all the more reason to see what has been obvious for nearly five years of unjustified war against Ukraine: The Kremlin isn’t interested in constraining its use of warfare. All of Europe is under threat.

■ “We’re not at war, but we are the daily target of hybrid warfare”, says the German interior minister. He may have been using “we” to describe Germany alone, but it’s hard to believe that the situation in any neighboring state is any different. We have entered a very stupid and very counterproductive era, in which war and war-like conflicts are going to swallow vast resources and waste the time of countless brilliant minds who could have been doing more productive things.

■ But, alas, they won’t, because they will be needed to push back and maintain a defensive perimeter in all kinds of realms (from kinetic weapons to cybersecurity to information warfare), all because some misanthropes in a few powerful places would rather set the world on fire than reap the benefits of peaceful ordered liberty. The people of the world deserve better.

■ Anyone who has experience with troubleshooting technical issues knows that, most of the time, problems don’t occur in isolation. Root out one problem and you’re likely to discover a related one. Wisdom lies in recognizing that causes and effects come in orders beyond just one.

■ As we grapple with important questions like “How can we get more people into cool locations when their health is at risk?”, we’ll find that there are upstream questions of social science to be answered. But we also need to look downstream: Any time we aggregate lots of people under a shared roof, we need to consider not just the temperature of the air but also its purity.

■ In 2020, health concerns tended to fixate on the quality of the air (and the risk it contained coronavirus) rather than the temperature. Knowing that dreadful contagious diseases often spread by air, and that we’ll never be done with the fight against them, it emerges that cooling the air and regulating its quality are related in important ways that are better addressed when the situation isn’t especially perilous.

■ But among the things unaccounted-for in that approach is this: A guaranteed outcome triggers the endowment effect. If one option is literally a sure thing, then the baseline moves -- suddenly, option #1 becomes “Do nothing and you’re happier than you were before you started” and option #2 becomes “Pay $50,000 for a lottery ticket that has a 50% chance of rewarding you $950,000, plus your original deposit.”

■ “Pay $50,000 for a lottery ticket” sounds like a much more aggressive choice. Loss often hurts more than how good it feels to win. Warren Buffett’s heuristic is “Don’t lose money”, and that’s worked out to be terrific advice for those who have followed him for the long run.

■ Thus, even though there are those who would like to over-interpret the results of such a poll, there’s nothing alarming in the results that say 65% of Americans would take the guaranteed money. It may not be the expected-value-maximizing choice, but it makes lots of sense when viewed from the perspective of time after the “guaranteed thing” has in fact paid out. From that angle, it’s hard to see how 25% of adults would agree to pay $50,000 for a lottery ticket.

■ Self-storage facilities tend to have three interesting characteristics: They’re usually fairly close to population centers (nobody wants to travel too far to get to their stuff), they’re generally broad and flat (the simpler the layout, the cheaper to construct), and they’ll tend to be found in the neighborhoods on the lower half of the local rent scale (near things like railroad tracks and highways, rather than where the land costs more per square foot).

■ Commonwealth Edison (or ComEd), the largest electric utility in Illinois, has found an interesting way to make those storage facilities more useful: By putting large rooftop solar sites on them. One of the characteristic properties of a market economy is that it rewards moving things from lower states of value to higher ones, and this is a very clever way to make otherwise unproductive roof area into something useful.

■ It’s hard to think of a single drawback: Community-level power generation is good for the utility because it reduces transmission losses (especially nice when it can be done renewably, without generating any pollution). It’s good for the property owner, who presumably profits directly from some sort of rental fee arrangement with the utility. And it’s good for the local municipality, since the solar installations presumably increase the taxable value of the property (in addition to bringing higher reliability to the electrical utility service).

■ Like putting solar panels over irrigation canals and strategically shading certain crops with solar panels to gain dual-use “agrivoltaics”, upgrading storage unit roofs by adding solar facilities seems like a no-brainer after the idea gets into the wild. With a little luck, the idea ought to spread quickly.

■ The key advice, though, is in the second sentence: “If you’ve got a lot of text to get through, you might find yourself turning to a Kindle instead, or even a good old-fashioned physical book”. No matter how many ways we adapt digital devices for text delivery, the “old-fashioned” print approach has certain insurmountable advantages. Be sure of this: A few hundred years from now, printed books will still disproportionately reward their readers for some of these reasons.

■ Reason #1: The eye and brain, working together, have evolved to prefer reflected light over projected light. Conventional ink-on-paper print products (or the very close replication thereof found in e-ink, like what is used in most Kindle readers) appeal to evolutionary preferences. In the natural world, only a few things actually generate light: Things like the Sun and fire. These things do not convey information, and in fact can be painful to observe for too long. Computer, tablet, and smartphone screens use projected light -- which is no small part of why they cause eye strain, at least some relief from which is found by turning to “night mode” or “eye comfort mode“. Any method that requires projected light is going to stand at a structural disadvantage.

■ Reason #2: Printed materials invite interaction with the text in the form of highlighting, marginalia, and other notes that come naturally when performed by hand. They take a different type and amount of coordination and concentration to perform on digital devices, assuming they are even possible (which they often are not). Yes, you can take notes with a browser window. No, it is not as instinctive as underlining a passage in a book using a pen. The greater the cognitive load required to perform the task, the more the reader is taken out of the act of reading and comprehending.

■ Reason #3: What’s printed on paper takes on a physical location in space. This can be advantageous on multiple levels: Many people recall where they encountered content as a physical act (e.g., “It was at the bottom of the page, about three pages back...”). Many more retain enough working memory of their reading that their eyes can dart effortlessly back and forth on the page as they re-read passages to compensate for distraction or confusion (e.g., “Hang on...I need to read that again”). Still others benefit from physical layout choices like footnotes, indices, and font sizes (a technique hilariously immortalized in The Onion’s “WA-” headline parody). All of these physical devices are basically impossible to replicate if the words have to move on a stationary screen instead of turning along with the page.

■ This is not to deny that digital reading experiences can be improved, nor that some physical reading experiences are terrible. Every experienced reader has been frustrated by type that is spaced poorly, in an illegible font, or spanning unnaturally wide columns that tax the eye’s ability to track. But if a fair amount of care and competence are brought to the act of print layout, then reading speed, comprehension, and convenience will almost inevitably and forever favor print over screens.

■ Keeping large urban areas sanitary is a problem of great importance and it’s never permanently solved. As we adapt and evolve, so do other parts of nature. Trash containerization has some obvious appeal, considering the way trash bags literally pile up in New York. No plan is perfect, and there are reasons both good and bad to oppose the Empire Bin project.

■ Good reasons? The project will cost $162 million, take scarce parking spaces out of service, and could hinder access to fire hydrants and utility access points (like manholes or valve boxes) in curbside areas.

■ Bad reasons? Because some people think “New York’s streets are entropic. Nothing here can exist without promptly getting bashed in, graffiti-ed, or splattered with swill.” This attitude, ranking somewhere between defeatism and pure cynicism, opens up no space for a better solution.

■ Amsterdam already has low-profile underground garbage compaction systems that store far more volume than is visible at street level. Could the same be done for New Amsterdam? It’s not impossible to imagine, though it would take a kind of mentality of urban innovation that hasn’t been in great supply.

■ American cities often suffered huge conflagrations in the 1800s, sparked by human activities taking place in the middle of highly combustible cities. Candles, broken gas pipes, and other human-related causes were common, but innovations like fire hydrants (patented in 1869) and automatic indoor sprinklers (patented in 1879), along with social practices (like insurance policies that rewarded fire prevention) had substantially curbed that type of fire by about the 1920s.

■ When big fires happen in cities today, it’s almost always because a wildfire crosses into an urban area from the outside. It’s still early in this disaster, but that looks like what happened in Spokane.

■ The evidence is pretty strong that at least some measure of climate warming is here to stay -- irreversible in the short to medium term, no matter what we do to reduce carbon emissions. And even a slight increase in average temperatures is likely to increase the frequency of drought in large parts of the world, which in turn makes it probable that wildfires will grow larger on average than they used to be. It’s a pretty dire situation when half a state is covered by an “extreme” fire weather outlook, as happened in Washington at the outbreak of the Spokane fires.

■ Some technological and policy innovations are needed, preferably soon. It just isn’t possible to deploy enough firefighting labor, equipment, or water to put down fires that expand to hundreds or thousands of acres that incorporate urban areas. People aren’t going to want a return to the old days, when preemptive explosive demolitions were used to create firebreaks. If the macro-scale climate conditions cannot be reversed, then community-scale efforts to deal with the resulting high-risk reality will need to follow.

■ However, it is important for people in certain positions to realize that the exception is also true: Even though most people are trying their best, some people are crooked. Some will do wrong, knowingly and willfully. And to protect the vast majority who are trying to be good, we need those who create, manage, and regulate powerful tools to account for the really villainous who walk among us.

■ Google excitedly announced an integration of its “Nano Banana 2” AI image generator with Google Earth’s mapping software. Mere hours later, it retracted the announcement because they had “seen people sharing screenshots of generated imagery that appear to violate our policies”.

■ It should generally be safe to assume that most people using an integrated tool like this would do so for above-board reasons of curiosity, imagination, and exploration. But it’s also reasonable to expect Google to take prudential precautions ahead of time in anticipation that someone would try to do something harmful with the same tool. External researchers didn’t have to try hard to get the tool to generate content that it absolutely should not have produced -- disinformation of the first order.

■ You don’t keep good people safe by assuming that everyone is going to be good all the time. You protect good people (who are, after all, the vast majority) by asking, “How would a malicious actor use this and how might we deter them?” Don’t assume that most people will use a thing badly, but do assume that a small number quite certainly will.

■ The problem, as one pseudonymous commenter observed, is that “there are already established organizations on the ground better equipped to address real needs but these activists and ‘disrupters’ keep claiming to reinvent the wheel while they line their pockets.” Specialization isn’t everything, but there’s also a good reason why the spork isn’t used at every dining table in America. In trying to be half one thing and half another, it doesn’t really do either all that well.

■ American civic life has been enriched by voluntary organizations since before we were even a country. It’s one of the things that stood out most to Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1800s: “There is only one country on the face of the earth where the citizens enjoy unlimited freedom of association for political purposes. This same country is the only one in the world where the continual exercise of the right of association has been introduced into civil life, and where all the advantages which civilization can confer are procured by means of it.” There are few problems we haven’t long sought to address through specialized voluntary organizations.

■ As a country, we’ve tolerated or encouraged a cult of worship surrounding “disruptors” and “founders” and we’re doing a terrible job of recognizing and encouraging the people who maintain vital existing institutions. It’s less glamorous but generally much more important. Dedicated new institutions to solve new problems might be welcome. Hybrid new institutions may be less so, especially if they appear to exist more to provide a vehicle to electoral success than to efficiently solve the problem. More important than either is the sustenance of good institutions that have evolved over time and experience to learn the best ways to address real needs.

■ Those who haven’t been really keeping up on matters may not realize just how much certain aspects of warfare have evolved in just a few short years. It is not the case that everything about grand strategy is suddenly irrelevant and that large multinational alliances should be torn up. It is the case, however, that the cost of causing significant and expensive damage has plunged, placing it well within the reach of non-state belligerents. In other words, the marketplace for war-like damage no longer contains high barriers to entry.

■ All other things being equal, this means a much more unpleasant future. If the cost of waging war (or something like it) drops radically, we should expect much more of it to take place. When facilities like oil refineries become the targets, that means more people will be affected more often, even when they have nothing to do with any of the conflict.

■ It’s a genie that won’t go back into the bottle, either. Drones, cyberattacks, and other rapidly-spreading vectors of trouble can’t be shut down in isolation. The knowledge behind them is already too well diffused to be contained, and that’s distasteful but basically pointless to lament. What matters now is getting to work, with all due urgency, on bringing down the cost of defending against the new, cheap weaponry -- and on making the potential targets of attack more resilient or easier and cheaper to repair.

■ There’s no time to waste on performative displays of backwards thinking about what matters in warfare. Physical attributes can matter a lot in certain specific forms of combat, but at least since World War II, it has been equally (or, usually, much more) important to have the right mental attributes. Dwight Eisenhower even noted it, writing: “[T]he American soldier, in spite of wisecracking, sometimes cynical speech, is an intelligent human being who demands and deserves basic understanding of the reasons why his country took up arms and of the conflicting consequences of victory or defeat.” Thinking troops were important 80 years ago. They are only more important now that the emerging problems have become more complex.

■ Some questions deserve reverence. The act of asking the question is itself a sacred one. Existential questions like “What should I do with my life?”, if asked sincerely, belong in that category.

■ Such questions are for humans to ask other humans: Parents, friends, siblings, cousins, teachers, mentors, clergy, therapists, classmates, co-workers, neighbors. They are questions that embodied beings with real, sensory experiences of life can discuss with one another, knowing that communication about those matters isn’t just in the words but in the non-verbal responses we give, too.

■ Nobody would ask such a question of a dog, because a dog cannot comprehend the words nor the abstractions involved in the meaning of life. But at least a dog can have feelings, whereas a chatbot cannot even have that much. Only another person can dwell on the depths of what certain questions mean. Just because a computer can “talk” like a person doesn’t mean it is properly equipped to be asked.

■ We can and should consult the dead on these matters, too, by exploring what they have written and otherwise recorded for us. But even then, the seeker has to bear in mind that the dead cannot offer a two-way street of communication, and their judgment is strictly limited by what was known of the world until the time they passed. But, again, at least the dead were once alive and knew that the experience of life is far more than what can be ordered in words on a page.

■ Every tool can be useful, and we shouldn’t be afraid to test the outer limits of what our tools can do. But we also need to know that tools applied to the wrong tasks can be seriously harmful, and if we don’t consider some elements of life to be too important for puttering around with tools that merely impersonate human connections, then we’re asking for trouble in unimaginable aspects of life.

■ Is any one incident like this directly attributable solely to global warming? Maybe or maybe not; there were, after all, devastating heat waves during the Dust Bowl, too. But the long-term trends are pretty clear, and higher average temperatures are probably going to have some non-trivial impact on the frequency of prolonged high-heat events.

■ So the question is: What are we going to do about it? Even if we were to stop all carbon emissions tomorrow, there’s plainly enough momentum in the atmosphere that heat extremes are likely here to stay. And despite the puritanical illusions of some people, air conditioning is clearly part of the answer.

■ We should take note, though, that air conditioning, as we know it, isn’t the only answer. The world needs a solid commitment to an all-of-the-above approach to cooling at the human level. Part of that means implementing not just active cooling via air conditioning, but also passive cooling and heat resistance: Window shades, retractable awnings, reflective glass, green roofs, and even green walls. They’re all worth getting into the mix.

■ Communities need to look at municipal-scale cooling features, as well. Urban heat islands are very real, and natural shade, heat-resistant paving materials, and urban greening programs need to be in the mix of answers, too.

■ For several generations, we’ve been attuned to ideas that made “progress” synonymous with “big, visible technology” -- highways, rockets, and giant buildings. Now it’s time to see and admire the high tech in greener, more incrementalist moves. Lives are counting on it.

■ Political figures can do lots of things to try to manipulate an economy in the short term, but it’s basically impossible to run from real-world consequences over the long term. The central bank may try to placate the Kremlin by making nominal cuts to interest rates, but the real consequences of the war can’t be painted over with wiggles in an interest rate.

■ The unjust and bloodthirsty war Russia launched against Ukraine is now almost halfway into its fifth year. It may be possible to suppress reporting on public opinion and even to smother public resentment with distractions, but it’s impossible to hide indefinitely from the laws of economics. A pointless, costly war is bound to weigh down an economy, as casualties mount well beyond a million, military production demands crowd out other sectors of the economy, and petroleum refineries become targets of retaliation.

■ And so that aggressor economy deserves to be weighed down. “[J]ust as we have done wrong by our choice, so too it is up to us to repent and to turn away from our evil actions” wrote the philosopher Maimonides. The choice to conclude the war doesn’t depend upon forcing Ukraine to negotiate; it depends upon Russia making the choice to stop.