Review: Hatching Twitter_ A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal by Nick Bilton

     I like this kind of book. It’s an irreverent view of the geeks and misfits who created Twitter, perhaps the most used but least necessary software on the planet.  That is, until Elon got a hold of it. 

    This book was first published in 2013 and so much has changed since then. Twitter (now X, in what has to be the silliest of rebrandings) has become perhaps less relevant than it ever was.  Musk has seen the price fall through the floor and see value evaporate.  

    Fun book if you like business origin stories, but he really needs to do a follow-up, perhaps annually. Just started Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter by Zoë Schiffer, that, so far, provides an in-depth view of Musk’s demolition of Twitter. 

Review: The Killing Zone: My Life in the Vietnam War by Frederick Downs

 The very personal story of a young lieutenant’s gradual disenchantment with the war in Vietnam. What especially comes through is the distinctness, often becoming bitterness, the soldiers feel toward the ARVN and the total lack of empathy for the “dinks.” Everything seemed pointless, They would spend days and weeks taking a piece of ground, taking casualties, only to pack up and leave after a period. Just as a company would become familiar with territory and feel like they are making progress, they would be relieved by a brand-new company of recruits who will have to learn their lessons all over, taking casualties in the process. In the meantime, everyone knows the one constant will be the permanence of the Vietnamese people who will be there and return to an area as soon as the Americans leave. 

Some relevant selections: 

However, we traveled in a vacuum of understanding among the villagers and farmers because neither we nor they understood the other’s language. Whenever we found a booby trap in or near a village full of people, we were powerless to question anyone or do anything about it. We couldn’t take the whole village prisoner, so we were forced to vent our anger by destroying the hootch closest to the booby trap. 

The American strategy was to draw them into a fight so we could use our superior firepower to destroy them. To win a battle, we had to kill them. For them to win, all they had to do was survive. 

*The trouble with Nam was that we didn’t control anything that we were not standing on at the time. Anything that moved outside our perimeters at night was fair game because the night belonged to the enemy and both sides knew it. The reality of only owning the ground you stood on meant making sure you continued to stay on that ground. 

Why did we want to kill dinks? After all, we had been mostly law-abiding citizens back in the world and we were taught that to take another man’s life was wrong. Somehow the perspective got twisted in a war. If the government told us it was alright and, in fact, a must to kill the members of another government’s people, then we had the law on our side. It turned out that most of us liked to kill other men. Some of the guys would shoot at a dink much as they would at a target. Some of the men didn’t like to kill a dink up close. The closer the killing, the more personal it became... I didn’t believe in torturing or in allowing a dink to die a lingering death. In the jungle we never took prisoners if we could help it. Every day we spent in the jungle eroded a little more of our humanity away. Prisoners could escape to become our enemy again. 

I stood alone on the side of the road, smoking a cigarette and thinking, perhaps for the first time, that we could lose this war. Standing alone under the cloudy sky, I felt alien in this land. We had just finished an operation back in the jungle and these men now were going out to a different part of the jungle to play the same deadly game of hide and seek with the enemy, probably with the same inconclusive result. 

Perhaps the most authentic Vietnam War memoir I have read.

To Tax or Not to Tax

 I supported Andrew Yang for president in now what seems decades ago, because he was the only candidate who recognized a fundamental economic problem we face: a declining rate of workers coupled with an increasing number of aged. His solution, outlined in the NYT in an Op-Ed is worth rereading: 

 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/14/opinion/andrew-yang-jobs.html

As with any important social issue, there are competing views and ways to interpret data. I have links to several of them below. Note that another component of Yang's plan was a guaranteed annual income, a solution first proposed by the darling of Libertarians, Friederich Hayek, who argued it would give workers more freedom as they would no longer be tied to job and location. 

https://www.niskanencenter.org/hayek-republican-freedom-and-the-universal-basic-income/

Some additional reading:

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/tax-not-the-robots/

https://hai.stanford.edu/news/radical-proposal-universal-basic-income-offset-job-losses-due-automation

https://www.futureofworkhub.info/comment/2019/12/4/robot-tax-the-pros-and-cons-of-taxing-robotic-technology-in-the-workplace

Review: In Pharoah's Army by Tobias Wolff

 In this extraordinary memoir of Wolff’s Vietnam  experience, there is a haunting scene that  reveals the major cultural differences between  the American soldiers and Vietnamese  culture. Wolff was a first lieutenant (he was  a special forces member) assigned as an adviser  to a South Vietnamese unit. He had spent a  year at language school in the United States  and was fluent in Vietnamese. He and some  ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) soldiers  are hanging out when two of the ARVN  find a small puppy wandering around. Wolff  watches, annoyed, as one of the soldiers swings  the puppy by a leg around his head and then  ties it to a tree. Wolff wanders over and asks  what they intend to name the dog. The Vietnamese  laugh bemusedly at this remark, but when Wolff persists, they laugh maliciously and  reply, “dog stew.” The sergeant grabs the dog  and, knowing it will drive Wolff nuts, swings the  puppy slowly over the fire. Wolff tries to get  them to stop, knowing they are playing with his  mind, but the cultural reality and his whiteness  prevent his interference. 

 
Racial issues pervade the story. Wolff was  attacked by a group of Vietnamese outside a  bar. He keeps yelling he must be the “wrong  man,” but they continue until another American  steps out of the bar and the attackers realize  they have the wrong person. Wolff realizes that to them all white people look the same. When  he tries to explain it to his black sergeant, the  sergeant understands him immediately and simply  says, “You nigger.” The analogy to his experience  in the United States is unmistakable.  

Wolff's analysis of the Tet offensive is striking.  "As a military project Tet failed; as a lesson it  succeeded. The VC came into My Tho and all  the other towns knowing what would happen.  They knew that once they were among the people  we would abandon our pretense of distinguishing  between them. We would kill them all to get at one. [Iraq come to mind, anyone?:] In this way they taught the people  that we did not love them and would not protect  them; that for all our talk of partnership and  brotherhood we disliked and mistrusted them,  and that we would kill every last one of them to  save our own skins. . . .They taught that lesson  to the people, and also to us. At least to me."

Review: Killing Zone: How and Why Pilots Die by Paul A. Craig (2nd edition)

 I am not a pilot, but I’m interested in aviation and especially in risk and how we measure and apply risk evaluations to normal activities. This book was recommended as the best comprehensive examination of risk in general aviation flying. Flying, in general, has become safer, although as Craig points out, the common trope that the most dangerous part of flying is the drive to the airport, is true only for commercial aviation;  it is definitely not true for general aviation. An analysis of comparative data reveals that general aviation is far more dangerous than driving.

 

Craig exams the problems with training, unintended consequences of otherwise valuable laws and regulations (e.g., the 1500 hr. minimum to be hired with the regionals placed emphasis on quantity rather than quality and meant that pilots would “bore holes in the sky” rather than seek experience with unusual conditions.) Changes in business practices can also have unintended effects. When it became possible to send digital copies of checks rather than the physical checks themselves, hundreds of pilot jobs were eliminated.  Those jobs had provided important experience flying in adverse weather conditions and circumstances that were now much less available as a training experience. Craig points out that military pilots were flying combat missions with less than 400 hours, but were very successful because of the type of scenario training they had received.

 

The revolution of “glass cockpits” that replaced the old mechanical instruments made flying safer, but counter-intuitively, also more dangerous as pilots needed to become information managers more than “stick and rudder” pilots.  There was the danger of thinking you are safer because of all the safety equipment and information overload that impinged on making the right decision. Was a pilot more likely to take off with a lower ceiling knowing he had auto-pilot and instruments that would have navigate through the weather. A very recent accident I learned about * involved a very experienced pilot (17,700 hours), in a very sophisticated airplane (pressurized Centurion) who mixed bad weather with night flying and poor cockpit management (fuel exhaustion) and got himself killed.

 

Craig examines the major types of GA accidents and analyzes them for lessons that can be learned from each. Ultimately, however, it will be the individual pilot’s decision-making skill, knowing when not to fly, and what circumstances to avoid, that will make more of a difference, I suspect. One of the biggest killers is “get-thereitis” and one NTSB investigator remarked that you should only fly if you have time to spare.  Craig adds to that the admonition that in addition to their pilot’s license and logbook, pilots should be required to have an active account with a car rental company.

 

 

*https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/348006