 Tool of the regime Machine tools are sometimes called “mother machines” — they’re the machines that make other machines. “Nearly every manufactured good is made using machine tools, or by machines which were made using machine tools,” writes the engineer Brian Potter in Construction Physics. For many years, the U.S. machine-tool industry was unparalleled — it was still the largest producer in the world until the 1980s. “But almost overnight, the industry collapsed.” The development of “numerical control,” a sort of early computerization, changed the industry in the 1960s, writes Potter, and the U.S. was slow to keep up: Japan “jumped on the NC bandwagon” as early as the 1950s. It meant Japanese machine tools were faster, cheaper, and more reliable than U.S. ones, while American firms were unwilling to make the investments to remain competitive. A recession in the early 1980s all but killed the industry. It’s a real problem: A shortage of machine tools is hampering U.S. production of shells for Ukraine. And that is called paying the Dane-geld Everyone loves Denmark. It has “has long ranked high on the list of societies that American liberals dream about turning the United States into,” says the Danish writer David Heinemeier Hansson: State-funded education, healthcare free at the point of need, a robust social safety net. Copenhagen is a beautiful, safe city, full of culture and good food, and extremely fun to cycle around. But “these benefits are fenced by a myriad of compromises and obligations,” says Hansson. Denmark has draconian laws on vagrancy, drugs, and begging. Mentally ill homeless people are often involuntarily committed. And immigration is highly restricted: 87% of Danes are ancestrally Danish. “The upside is a country that is remarkably safe,” says Hansson. But it is not a multicultural society like the U.S. “Almost any Dane, with the right will and gumption, could … become American,” writes Hanssen. “But almost no American … will ever be able to truly become a Dane in the eyes of the Danish.” Future perfect Most political pundits are rubbish at telling the future. The political scientist Phil Tetlock once had them make solid, time-limited, falsifiable predictions and found that most people do little better than chance. But a few people do much better, and the very best of them, the top 2%, that Tetlock discovered are called “superforecasters.” On his Substack Telling the Future, one superforecaster, Robert De Neufville, interviews another, Michael Story. Story believes that the community of superforecasters has “not had as much impact as we could.” You’d think that people who are able to predict the future would be useful for decision-makers, but the forecasts are not always presented in ways that people can use. Story set up his own forecasting firm to try to improve that situation. He’s also a Russia expert, and told de Neufville of his heuristic for improving forecasts about Russia: When other forecasters put a probability on whether Russia “would take some kind of aggressive stance, I would just up that by 10%.” |
