Judge Says All Texas Prisons to be Air-Conditioned by 2029

  

Last Tuesday, Sept. 22, U. S. District Judge Robert Pitman ruled that the Texas state prison system must install air conditioning for every last one of its prison beds no later than Dec. 31, 2029.  According to an Associated Press report, Texas prison administrators have vowed to appeal this ruling, so it is far from a done deal.  But this event is a landmark in the long and sweaty road toward providing prisoners something that has become to other Texans almost as necessary as food and water in the summertime.

 

Texas and air conditioning go back a long way.  The first church building to be air-conditioned west of the Mississippi, and possibly in the entire U. S., was the Lutcher Memorial First Presbyterian Church of Orange, a town in the extreme southeast corner of the state.  Oil was discovered nearby in 1913, and the newly prosperous residents paid for not only a state-of-the-art air-conditioning system to be installed for the relatively small 150-member congregation, but also for a separate building to house the diesel engines that ran the ammonia compressors.  You see, Orange did not yet have an electric utility, but that didn't stop the Orange Presbyterians.  And the humid pollen-laden summer streets of Houston saw another air-conditioning first in 1930 when a wealthy businessman suffering from hay fever paid to get a custom-installed air conditioner in his Cadillac, apparently the first passenger vehicle so provided in the U. S.

 

So with such a glorious history of air conditioning, why has Texas been so far behind when it comes to air-conditioning prisons?  The answer depends on who you ask.

 

The prison administrators themselves say it will cost too much.  They have been pegging away at air-conditioning one unit here and another unit there for many years, but as of the end of 2026, they estimate that only 60,000 prison beds will be in air-conditioned spaces.  That's less than half of the approximately 143,000 people housed in Texas prisons today.  In the system's defense, this does represent progress compared to eight years ago, when in 2018 only 35,000 beds were air-conditioned. 

 

But people are still dying of the heat inside Texas prisons—three in 2023 alone.  A prison sentence should not turn into a death-by-heatstroke sentence.  And besides the avoidable human suffering that old un-air-conditioned prisons cause, the prison administrators have admitted that the lack of air conditioning in prisoner spaces has made it harder to recruit guards and other staff.  Working in a prison is no picnic, and if you add to it the fact that you're likely to be dealing with 100-degree-plus airless environments as well, I'm surprised they can find anybody to work under such conditions no matter how well they're paid. 

 

There is plenty of blame to go around in this situation.  During the 2023 legislative cycle, the state had a budget surplus of $33 billion.  Out of that surplus, the Texas legislature in its wisdom decided to allocate a measly $85 million to prison air conditioning.  While that did help, it fell far short of air-conditioning every Texas prison, which the prison system itself estimates will cost on the order of $1.5 billion.  This situation reminds me of the engineering adage:  "If there's not enough time (or money) to do it right, there's always enough time to do it over." 

 

The lawsuit leading to the recent ruling was filed initially by Bernie Tiede, a former mortician whose life story (and life sentence for murder) inspired the wickedly funny Richard Linklater film "Bernie."  Other prisoner-rights groups joined in the suit, and there was rejoicing among these and other prisoner advocates when the news of the decision reached them.

 

Now it is true that once upon a time, no prison was air-conditioned anywhere.  And once upon a time, say around 1910 before air conditioning was a thing in Texas, there were only 3.9 million people in the state, not 32 million.  And those few rugged souls were used to living in hot houses, going to work in hot stores and offices, and just sucking it up. 

 

Virtually no one in Texas lives that way today, including members of the criminal class.  If there were some weird sociological phenomenon that prevented anyone with a present or future criminal record from living with air conditioning outside prisons, it would be reasonable not to air-condition Texas prisons, much as Muslims are provided with copies of the Quran—it's what they're used to having, or not having.

 

But that is not the case.  I don't know of any medical studies that would confirm this, but it's likely that people not used to spending most of their time in 100+ temperatures are physiologically vulnerable to heat stroke and related ills when put into such temperatures.  At any rate, Judge Pitman ruled that subjecting prisoners to such conditions now amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, which is prohibited by the U. S. Constitution.  And the Texas Department of Criminal Justice now has less than four years to fix the situation.

 

Administratively, they are between a rock and a hard place.  While their estimate of over a billion dollars may be high, they can't spend money they don't have.  And it would be an exercise in Pollyannaish optimism to expect the Texas legislature next year to calmly and deliberately hand over the money needed to air-condition people who can't even vote for them in many cases. 

 

But miracles can happen, and maybe we really will see all Texas prisons air-conditioned before the expiration of the twelfth decade after those Presbyterians exulted in their 70-degree comfort in the steamy summer of 1914 in Orange.  Mind you, I have nothing against Presbyterians.  But everybody in the state government who can do something about this situation should read Luke 16:19-31, in which Jesus tells about the rich man who walked by the poor, sick Lazarus every day without helping him.  Lazarus died and went to be comforted by Father Abraham.  When the rich man died, he found himself in very warm conditions indeed, warmer even than a Texas prison in August.  To the Texas legislators and prison administrators I will only say, it can happen to you.

 

Sources:  The AP article reporting the decision by Judge Pitman is at https://apnews.com/article/hot-texas-prison-judge-ruling-air-conditioning-fa2f1997bd77b47129cdfe5c2350332d.  The First Presbyterian Church of Orange (still standing, with the power-plant building behind it) had its air conditioning described in Ice & Refrigeration, vol. 46, June 1914, pp. 309-310.  The first air-conditioned car is recounted in Raymond Arsenault's essay "The End of the Long Hot Summer:  The Air Conditioner and Southern Culture" in The Journal of Southern History, vol. 50, Nov. 1984, pp. 597-628.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Judge Pitman.

Should We Run For the Hills From AI?

  

In the last few weeks, at least two well-publicized resignations from AI firm Anthropic have drawn attention to the pace at which AI models are getting more powerful all the time.  Anthropic's safety head Mrinank Sharma has stated his intention to resign as of next Feb. 8 in an open letter.  And Jacob Coxon has stated in an X thread that "the people building AI earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade."  According to Wikipedia, Anthropic's leading safety researcher, Evan Hubinger, says that there is a greater than 10% chance that AI systems could "kill all humans" in the next ten years.

 

Reactions to these outcries have ranged from indifference to panic or cynicism, with some noting that Anthropic is planning an initial public offering of stock this coming November.  Recalling the adage that there's no such thing as bad publicity, meaning that just getting your name out there is more important than what they're saying about you, this last take may have a grain of truth in it.  But the more likely explanation for this spate of criticisms and resignations is that something is going on in AI firms that scares the socks off some of those working on it.

 

Predictions of superintelligent systems taking over the world are not new.  I have on my shelf a book by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom called Superintelligence that was published in 2014.  In it he examines in thorough detail the various ways that AI could break bad, and discusses possible countermeasures humanity can take.  After three hundred pages of analysis that examines most if not all of the disaster scenarios that people are discussing today, he concludes]the book with these words:  "In this situation, any feeling of gee-wiz [sic] exhilaration would be out of place.  Consternation and fear would be closer to the mark; but the most appropriate attitude may be a bitter determination to be as competent as we can, much as if we were preparing for a difficult exam that will either realize our dreams or obliterate them."

 

The main fear is that AI will get out of control in some harmful way.  That has already happened with the hacking of the cloud-computing company Hugging Face by OpenAI models that were supposed to be isolated in a "sandbox," but managed to escape and damage a good portion of Hugging Face's infrastructure.  This is the most well-publicized example of an AI system that did something bad that its supposed controllers did not intend.  OpenAI says that it's taken measures to prevent such incidents in the future, but as we have pointed out elsewhere, this incident looks a lot like a warning that worse things could happen if AI firms don't implement vastly more secure means to keep experimental AI models under control.

 

The leaders of several AI firms in the U. S. have considered a mutual arrangement to slow down the pace of improvements to allow security measures to keep up.  This has caused concerns that China will catch up to or surpass U. S. competence in AI.  Discussions of government regulation have been discouraged by President Trump, who seems to have never met an AI model he didn't like (never mind about other kinds of models).  So if the government isn't going to do anything significant, and the companies can't get together on how to moderate the pace of improvement, what should the average citizen do?

 

Harking back to an existential threat that I experienced when I was in my twenties, the threat of nuclear annihilation was ever-present as I was growing up.  Nobody I knew developed nuclear weapons, but we all had to live with the consequences of the two superpowers being able to vaporize each other in a matter of a few hours.  There's an existential threat for you.  Somehow (my own hypothesis is it was the grace of God), we have managed to get from then to now without ending it all in a forest of mushroom clouds. 

 

AI is a different kind of threat, admittedly.  The kinds of systems that are most vulnerable to it seem to partake of the nature of AI itself:  large-scale networked systems that are centrally controlled.  There are certain infrastructure vulnerabilities in the U. S. that genuinely concern me, notably the fragile nature of  power grids.  They rely on substation transformers that cost upwards of millions of dollars, are hugely inconvenient to repair or replace, and are very limited in supply.  There have been news reports recently about how a concentrated and coordinated attack on substations nationwide—either physical, which would be hard to do, or a cyberattack, which might be a lot easier—could cripple the grid enough to leave large swathes of the U. S. without electric power for months.  That could lead to a civilization-destabilizing crisis.

 

Fortunately, there are some things we can do about this.  One is ramping up production of spare transformers (preferably making them in the U. S.) so that we have enough to replace as many as we might lose in a widespread attack.  Another is to take advantage of smart-grid capabilities now coming online to make it possible to operate pieces of the grid without having it all interlocked together.  As more renewable sources come online that are distributed rather than coming in a few big lumps like traditional power plants, one can imagine making the power grid more like the internet, which was designed to be robust against damage to a good many of its nodes. 

 

I'm not a power-systems engineer and this may be a fantasy, but it seems like it's within the realm of possibility.  Of course, determined hackers can wreck even well-protected infrastructure.  But making the grid more local, which is what we're really talking about, makes it harder for an attacker to take down all of it.  If local pieces have to be dealt with one by one, there is safety in variety.

 

I hope we can keep AI under control to the extent that the benefits outweigh the liabilities.  But if the history of engineering ethics is any guide, though, we will learn how to do this by dealing with the aftermath of some failures first.

 

Sources:  I referred to posts by Mrinank Sharma at https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andrew-hilger-436b713_the-attached-resignation-letter-from-mrinank-activity-7427113299336454144-4CVm/and Jacob Coxon at https://x.com/hilbertspaess/status/2097476196791709843 as well as the Wikipedia articles on "Existential risk from artificial intelligence" and "OpenAI-Hugging Face incident."

 

Update on Reader Survey:  As I suspected, there appear to be relatively few of you who read this blog regularly.  But I am very grateful to all nine who responded to the survey, and hope there are a few more who didn't bother to respond but still read it regularly.  You are in exclusive company!

 

Survey for Engineering Ethics Blog Readers

   

As promised last week, today I am asking my readers to take the usual three to five minutes you would use to read my blog, and instead complete a short survey which can be found at

 

https://forms.gle/75G4ZxDZFJyNcaD19

 

It consists only of two multiple-choice questions and two optional comment spaces, so it's not like I'm asking you to spend a lot of time on it.  Indications from the statistics that the blogger system provides are that relatively few of you are regular readers.  Most visitors to the website show up because they are directed here by interest in a particular issue I happen to be addressing.

 

Whatever your reading habits, I would like to hear from you.  The regular blog will resume next week.

 

Karl Stephan

AI Use in Academia: Is Everything Not Forbidden Compulsory?

  

In T. H. White's imaginative fantasy of the youth of King Arthur, The Once and Future King, the magician Merlin transforms Arthur into a variety of animals in order to teach him the virtues he will need in human society.  One of the most chilling transformations comes about when Merlin launches him into an ant colony.  Suddenly Arthur can hear the constant drone of instructions from on high, and read the ever-present propaganda posters that tell him how regimented the lives of ants are.  One particular sign encapsulates the essence of totalitarianism that leaves no room for free will:  "Everything Not Forbidden Is Compulsory."

 

Over the past year I have observed how artificial-intelligence propaganda, if you want to call it that, has pervaded the workplace and, after the usual delay, has washed up on the shores of academia.  At the beginning of the fall semester, just before classes began, I received an invitation to a two-day AI seminar in which a new faculty member would be conducting exercises in how to create a website with AI, how to use it in research and administrative tasks, and more.  Besides invitations from our school director, I received an email directly from the person conducting the seminar the day before it began.  I'm sure he did a good job with the seminar, although I wasn't able to attend it due to some prior travel I'd planned.  But my confidence in the project was not increased when I noted that in the email from the seminar leader, he had misspelled the word "tomorrow."  Either he didn't take his own advice and skipped letting AI check his emails, or the AI system thought he was trying to be funny.

 

It is becoming increasingly clear that anybody in a business that could be described in George Gilder's phrase as symbolic manipulation—and that definitely includes academics—will soon be effectively forced to use AI for any substantial workflow processes.  The reason is simple.  If people who use AI begin producing at a rate that equals what three or four or ten people can do unaided by AI, those who refrain from boosting their output with AI will begin to look like slackers.  If competition is a factor in keeping one's job, as it always is for untenured faculty and continues in some form after tenure, using AI in a way that boosts your output will soon be necessary.

 

I'm in a peculiar position in that a year ago, I began what is called phased retirement, in which I work half-time for three years with an option to continue after that.  The one course I teach involves a hands-on lab course.  Until they bring me an AI robot that can help students figure out what is wrong with a circuit they built, I don't see how AI is going to be of much direct help in the lab. 

 

I'm not an AI Luddite. A few months ago I bought a subscription to Claude and got it to do a few things.  It was an interesting experience, and probably saved me some time compared to how long the tasks would have taken without it.  But there's a learning curve involved in writing effective AI prompts, and I would probably have to use it every day to get good enough at it to be able to say my net productivity had increased.  From what I understand, Claude is now free to faculty members on request, so I'll probably let my subscription lapse.  But I'm still not sure what I'll do with it.

 

The application of the ant-colony slogan to this situation is fairly obvious.  The much-abused concept of academic freedom includes the right (privilege?) of deciding what methods and approaches I will use in teaching my class.  If I am strongly urged, through peer pressure and cheerleading emails, to use AI in teaching, my freedom isn't breached, exactly, but neither is it enhanced.  Nobody has ordered me to start using AI, so my university is very far from an ant colony, although an observer during the break between classes might be forgiven for likening the campus to what happens when you kick over an ant bed. 

 

I'm old enough to remember the transition from the secretarial pool where you took your hand-written report to be typed up, to the word processor programs we were given on our new computer terminals and told to use for reports from now on.  There was some grumbling among the older staff, and I remember one professor who agreed to start using the word processor, but insisted on retaining his secretary to deal with all his emails.  Both he and the secretary have presumably retired by now.  It was an annoying transition for a few years, and produced a lot of badly spelled and composed memos before spell-check programs were added.  But now, personal secretaries are like personal jets, reserved only for members of the very highest reaches of an organization, and everybody else makes do with their own hands on the keyboard.

 

Besides, even without meaning to use AI, I've started using it by simply doing the same kinds of things I've done for a while, such as consulting Google.  It now defaults to AI mode, and you have to positively turn it off if you don't want the AI summary as a response to your inquiry.  As an example, I was pretty sure that the forbidden-compulsory quote was from The Once and Future King, but I asked Google to make sure, as I don't have a copy of the book handy.  Google's AI Overview not only confirmed me in my suspicion, but quoted the exact passage, and appended an explanation of the context, "a world completely stripped of individual free thought and personal freedom." 

 

So if I get a poll in a few months—probably AI-generated—asking me how I'm using AI in my teaching, research, or service, I'll be able to check a little box saying in effect, "Yes, Master, I'm using AI."  But not necessarily because I want to, or because I think it makes me better at what I do.  Simply because as it's no longer forbidden, it's well on the way to becoming compulsory.

 

Sources:  T. H. White's The Once and Future King was published in 1958. 

 

NOTE:  Next week, instead of the usual blog, I will publish a reader's poll.  I currently receive virtually no feedback of any form from publishing this blog.  This poll will be your opportunity to (a) let me know somebody reads the blog and (b) give me suggestions for improvement.  So don't be surprised, as you have been warned.

Deadly Negligence at Washington State Paper Mill

  

In July of 2025, inspectors hired by the Nippon Dynawave Packaging Company to assess the condition of a tank at the firm's Washington State paper mill in Longview delivered some bad news.  The tank contained "white liquor," a highly corrosive solution of sodium hydroxide (lye) and sodium sulfide used to break down wood pulp in the initial stages of papermaking.  The inspection by Applied Technical Services LLC showed that the wall thickness of the tank had deteriorated in the lower portions below the minimum safe wall thickness, and the tank was in danger of collapsing.  The inspector's report stated that the tank was "not fit for continued service unless corrected."

 

However, despite the urgency of the report, apparently no repairs were made to the tank, and it continued to be used until the following May 26.  On that date, a digestor that used the tank's output was taken out of service, but white liquor continued to flow into the tank until it reached its capacity in excess of 900,000 gallons.  Just to make clear what a lot of liquid that is, 900,000 gallons would fill a cube fifty feet (15 meters) high, long, and wide.

 

A little after 7 A. M. that day, a wall of the tank collapsed, sending most of that 900,000 gallons cascading through a parking lot, breaking down building walls, and flowing into meeting rooms where workers were already gathering for the day.  A total of 11 people died in the accident, and several more workers and first responders were severely injured, suffering chemical burns. 

 

The facts relating to the tank inspection were released as part of a preliminary report by the U. S. Chemical Safety Board, the national agency charged with investigating major accidents involving chemicals.  The board's chairman, Steve Owens, stated "we are greatly concerned that the tank was not promptly removed from service or properly repaired after the clear findings in the inspection report." 

 

And the findings were definitely clear.  The Wikipedia page on the disaster reproduces a graph of average wall thickness versus height for the tank.  At the "course" (basically a circumferential row of steel plates) that was at a height of between 7.5 and 15 feet, the calculated minimum safe thickness was 0.5 inches.  But the measurements, presumably performed by some type of externally applied thickness-measuring device, showed that the average thickness was as low as 0.25 inches to 0.3 inches.  Clearly, the tank, and the plant and its workers, were living on borrowed time.

 

News reports failed to reveal why the inspection was made, but clearly there were concerns about the tank's integrity that inspired it.  What appears to be inexcusable is the fact that the plant's management did nothing about the critical safety issue discovered by the report until the tragedy occurred.

 

The plant is still out of service following the accident.  Company officials reached for comment refused to comment on "individual findings or documents."  But clearly, wrongful-death lawsuits filed against the company have received a boost from the Chemical Board findings.

 

Maintaining a safe environment in a complex chemical plant is a continual battle against thousands of hazards that are kept at bay only by constant vigilance, enforcement of rigid rules, and inspections such as the one that revealed the tank's too-thin walls.  The physics behind the strength-of-materials engineering that sets limits for tank wall thinning has been known since the nineteenth century.  And modern nondestructive inspection methods now provide safety engineers with abundant data that can flag hazardous conditions such as the one in Tank G at the Longview plant. 

 

But all the instrumentation and safety manuals in the world will not prevent an accident if those in charge don't take the actions required to avert it.  And in this case, for whatever reason, action was not taken.

 

If the tank was the main source of white liquor for the whole plant, repairing it would probably have meant shutting down the entire facility.  Well-run plants schedule maintenance downtime into their operating calendar for just such repairs, but it is not known whether Nippon Dynawave had such a schedule or whether their policy was simply to run things until something major broke. 

The facility is over seventy years old, according to Wikipedia.  While age itself is not necessarily an indication of hazardous conditions, older plants can give rise to outmoded habits and customs that simply wouldn't be tolerated in newer facilities.  The pressure to keep a facility running at all costs is always present when a large investment is at stake, and it is management's job to see that this pressure is resisted to the extent of calling for periodic maintenance shutdowns to allow for repairs such as were needed on the tank that collapsed.

 

It's significant that the failure occurred under conditions of maximum stress when the tank was filled with more than the usual amount of white liquor.  This condition might not have occurred for months, but sooner or later something was going to give, and it was the unfortunate fate of the eleven workers who died to be there when it happened.

 

This accident is unusually simple in that only a couple of coincidental factors had to come together for it to happen:  dangerous wall thinning and an unusually heavy load on the tank.  It would also have been relatively simple to avoid:  take the tank out of service and repair it before it busts.  But for whatever reason, that was not done.

 

The firm operating the plant now faces months of losses from a shutdown following the accident and huge legal and regulatory problems as well.  It's an old lesson, but one that can never be repeated enough:  when something really dangerous is discovered in a facility, safety officials should have the power to do anything necessary up to and including calling for a plant-wide shutdown in order to address it.  A management structure that doesn't permit this is just as dangerous as having a wall of a tank full of lye that's way too thin.

 

Sources:  I referred to an AP report on the U. S. Chemical Board preliminary investigation at https://apnews.com/article/nippon-dynawave-longview-chemical-tank-rupture-washington-3da9aff673419848f5cc29e076baabeb and the Wikipedia article "2026 Longview, Washington paper mill chemical tank collapse."

How Priorities Determine Methods: The Church at Clear Creek Abbey

  

Our material culture is largely disposable, thanks to technology and more than that, a prevailing attitude that is deeply rooted, largely invisible, and amounts to something close to "eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die."  And it's getting worse, if the construction methods of typical modern housing are compared with those of even a generation ago as an indication of trends.  Sometimes things are made clearer by going to extreme contrasts.  So today I'd like to look at a situation that is about as far from your typical apartment-complex project as you can get:  the planned church at Clear Creek Abbey outside Hulbert, Oklahoma.

 

I've never been to Hulbert or visited the Abbey.  But somehow I got on their mailing list even though I'm not Catholic, and I make a donation every year mainly to get their nice big calendars.  All I know about the place is what's on their website and what the abbot, Brother Philip Anderson, writes in his letters, which are nothing like the usual charity-solicitation things we often get in the mail. 

 

In the one that came the other day, he describes their plans for the church building.  Money is mentioned nowhere in the letter.  What he describes instead is the extremes to which they are going to get what they want, which is, as the enclosed donation slip says, "an abbey to last a thousand years." 

 

There is a professional building contractor in overall charge, and photos on their website show what looks like a conventional building site with modern backhoes, etc. being used.  So this is not an all-amateur project by any means.  But the meaning of "amateur" in the sense of someone who does something for love rather than money applies especially to the church part of the project.

 

Take the doors, for instance.  The abbey is in a wooded area of Oklahoma, and the monks have harvested lots of oak trees, built their own sawmill, and have cut enough lumber to make thick mortise-and-tenon doors that need no nails or glue to hold them together.  These doors will hang on hinges that the monks will forge in their own blacksmith shop. 

 

The roof of the church will be supported by 56 beams, cut and installed by the monks, beams that will support a red-cedar ceiling also made by the monks.

 

The most telling phrase comes when the abbot describes the 78 choir stalls, which are kind of individual niche seats for the monks to sit, stand, or kneel in during the chanting and other operations that go on in their daily Divine Office.  Prayer is the most important thing that the monks do.  And those who chant the Office spend about five hours a day in the choir stalls.  As the abbot puts it, a monk's choir stall "is a critical furnishing:  the stall is to the monk what the cockpit is to the fighter pilot."

 

That striking comparison sums up both the parallels and the radical differences between the monks of the Abbey and, well, pretty much everybody else in the modern world.  Speed and quick action are of the essence to a fighter pilot; so much so, in fact, that we are probably seeing the gradual waning of that profession in preference to robot-guided devices that can respond faster than any human being.  But the fighter pilot has a definite purpose:  to shoot at enemies.  And in order to do that, he has to be in a place designed to expedite his task effectively.

 

So does the monk.  Only his enemies are not usually visible.  That doesn't mean they aren't real.  Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of church history realizes the power of its enemies, and how prayer is the chief weapon humans can employ in that conflict. 

 

Another weapon is persistence.  That's one reason the monks are putting so much of their own labor into doing things that in a secular setting would be rejected as absurdly costly and inefficient.  Who builds his own sawmill to make lumber anymore?  Who makes his own doors and hinges rather than going down to Lowe's?  Nobody I know of, except the monks up in Oklahoma, and probably other monasteries around the world engaged in similar projects. 

 

I suppose that while they're forging the hinges, they'll make a few replacement parts so that when the originals wear out in a few hundred years, they'll just go down to the stockroom, blow the dust off, and install new ones.  Only "new" will apply to objects that will have been kept for centuries.  Almost nobody even thinks that way anymore, let alone does anything about it. 

 

But the monks have good reasons to think that way.  It was a secular Jewish philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, who popularized the Latin phrase sub specie aeternitatis, "under the aspect of eternity."  Before his time, nearly everybody thought that way, realizing that our time on earth was just a flicker of a candle compared to eternity spent either in Heaven or Hell.  Only when people began to focus mainly on present-day issues was it possible even to categorize the older manner of thought with that phrase, as a fish doesn't realize it's in water until you pull it out into the air.

 

This is not necessarily an argument against efficiency or mass production or making and selling things that don't last very long.  There are good reasons for all those things.  But I simply want to use the examples of the monks at Clear Creek Abbey to show that it's not the only way to do things.  Depending on your priorities, you may do things differently than other people do.  And the priorities of the masons, millworkers, carpenters, and blacksmiths at the Abbey show that if you really believe in eternal things, efficiency will no longer be your god.

 

Sources:  Abbot Philip Anderson's August 2026 letter to the Friends of Clear Creek Abbey was the source of the quotation above and the information about their building methods.  The Abbey's website is at https://clearcreekmonks.org.

Do U. S. Cars Need AM Radios?

  

The National Association of Broadcasters think they do.  A bill kicking around the U. S. Congress would mandate that all new passenger vehicles sold in the U. S. be capable of receiving the AM broadcast band.  The AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act of 2025 has made it out of a Senate committee and is awaiting action by the full Senate, after bipartisan sponsors wrote it in response to the fact that electric-vehicle (EV) makers such as Tesla no longer build in AM radios. 

 

Despite support from both sides of the aisle, the bill is not without its opponents.  A group called the Zero Emission Transportation Association points out that building EVs that can receive AM radio signals directly is well-nigh impossible due to the short-range electromagnetic interference (EMI) produced by the electronics in the vehicles' power trains.  If EV manufacturers are forced to comply with the act's mandate, the extensive shielding required will put them at a competitive disadvantage worldwide, because AM radio elsewhere, especially in Europe, is looked on as an outmoded technology, and nobody much misses it.

 

Opponents also point out that internet apps such as TuneIn already support direct streaming of the audio content of many AM stations, so the absence of a physical AM radio in a car is no big deal. 

 

On the pro side, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has played a safety card, saying that emergency notifications are carried by AM radio and eliminating it from cars could lead to hazards for people who have no other way to get emergency notices.  "Tens of millions" of people listen to AM radio every day, they say, and many listen in their cars.  AM radio reaches remote areas that may not have consistent mobile-phone coverage, and agricultural regions rely on it disproportionally to the rest of the country. 

 

Of course, the NAB has a direct financial interest in preserving AM radios in cars, because that's how they make money.  But there's nothing wrong with an interest group trying to protect its revenue stream.

 

Those who oppose the bill say that the public-safety argument is largely bogus.  They cite a national emergency-notification test held in October of 2023 in which only 1% of those polled received the notification via AM radio. 

 

I've tried to lay out both sides of this controversy as fairly as I can.  Now I'm going to tell you what I think personally.  I'd hate to see AM radio go away, but largely for sentimental reasons.

 

Maybe it seems odd to be sentimental about a technology, but engineers sometimes extend sentiment to peculiar objects.  AM radio was the first widespread use of electromagnetic radiation, and while that alone should not be an argument in its favor for continued use, there is a kind of virtue that attaches to any sort of human custom preserved through time.  It turns out that I am a more-or-less constant user of AM radio when I'm driving alone (my wife wouldn't like the content). 

 

The station I listen to has its transmitter about thirty miles away from where I live, so I'm in the standard-signal-strength region of its 1-kilowatt transmitter.  Nevertheless, there are several places around town where it's hard to hear the signal because of interference from power lines and other mysterious sources.  On the interstate, certain trucks (possibly electric and maybe even autonomous) emit some sort of EM trash that blanks out the signal until they pass me by.  So even if you have a working AM radio in your car, all is not well with that band.

 

Worldwide, AM broadcasting has largely been abandoned for FM, which is still a viable technology in many areas.  Tesla has dropped FM radios as well, assuming that its largely young tech-savvy market will get its entertainment content via streaming or mobile-phone Bluetooth hookups.  So if the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act passes, we'd be a global outlier in preserving a technology that most other countries have dropped.

 

The world has witnessed a similar process in the fate of shortwave broadcasting.  In its heyday, which extended from the 1920s to the 1990s, shortwave broadcasting was a comparatively inexpensive way of getting your message out literally to the whole world.  Accordingly, every major international player had its broadcasting service, and the Voice of America chain operated by the U. S. government played a significant role during the Cold War. 

 

With the advent of the internet, however, a new propaganda channel opened up, and shortwave was taken over by religious broadcasters whose economics run on a different basis.  Today, shortwave broadcasting is almost gone, and the Voice of America effectively ceased operations in 2025. 

 

If the AM-in-every-car act doesn't pass, people with EVs won't be able to get AM signals directly, but the station I listen to also has a streaming service, and if I had a smart phone I'm sure I could hook it up somehow to listen to the station that way.  (I own a fairly dumb phone by choice, but that's a rarity.)  There will still be plenty of cars on the road with AM bands on their radios, and so it's not like we're banishing AM from the airwaves permanently.   

 

An outfit called Edison Research finds that more than half of listeners to AM and FM radio combined listen in their cars, so the automotive market share is significant.  Now and then I have reason to talk about AM radio technically in my engineering class, and I always preface my remarks with something like, "Now I know that none of you listen to AM radio. . ." and I've never been contradicted.

 

So as old duffers like me fade from the scene and EVs slowly make up a larger share of cars on the road, AM will continue its gentle slide toward the sunset of technology.  But whether it will get there, or be artificially bolstered by the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act for a while longer, is a decision that our august body the U. S. Congress has to make. 

 

As for me, I'm not planning to buy an EV any time soon, so I'll listen to my AM radio as long as I drive my car, which I plan on doing for a while yet.

 

Sources:  A description of the Senate's version of the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act of 2025 can be found at https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/315.  The National Association of Broadcasters arguments in favor of the bill can be read at https://www.nab.org/advocacy/issue.asp?id=6719.  The Zero Emission Transportation Association's arguments against it are at https://www.zeta.org/amradio.  I also referred to statistics on radio listening at https://www.facebook.com/Broadcasters/posts/a-new-report-finds-in-car-listening-now-accounts-for-53-of-amfm-radio-listening-/1358434222980434/.