Basic Books UK Runs a Joint Social-Media Promotion!, & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-01-27 Fr
Basic Books UK Runs a Joint Social-Media Promotion!, & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-01-27 Fr
Trying to strengthen their Twitter game! Follow @BasicBooksUK and retweet! Very much worth doing, if there is going to be a Twitter in a year!... Learning from Past Fights with Inflation.... Lean...
FOCUS: Basic Books UK Runs a Joint Social-Media Promotion!
Trying to strengthen their Twitter game! Follow @BasicBooksUK and retweet! Very much worth doing, if there is going to be a Twitter in a year!
Let me tell you briefly about the other two books:
Julia Hobsbawm’s The Nowhere Office <https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09CPNSNT8> surveys how the plague’s enforcing social distancing as an imperative has changed how we work ane how we thikn about work, largely office work. She then tried to draw conclusions as to how those of us who work in or rely on office work can and should adapt. We have a chance to make things much better—more flexible, more productive, and more human. She looks forward to our managing to successfully build a hybrid office/home model of work as the benchmark. I tend to be skeptical about how well this will work. I suspect that the shift to hybrid, if it happens, will greatly benefit incumbants in offices and make it very difficult for new hires to find their place. But Hobsbawm argues not, and argues very convincingly.
William Magnuson’s For Profit <https://www.amazon.com/dp/1541601564> is a history of the corporation since ancient Rome. Corporations, especially modern corporations, have exorbitant privileges of continuity, scale, resource mobilization, and—in our day—limited liability. They also are slow-moving artificial intelligences with the purposes of (a) making money, and (b) giving those who find themselves gaining jobs at the top of the corporate hierarchy a quiet and very comfortable life. Organized example corporation by example corporation—Roman origins, Medici, the British East India Company, the Union Pacific, Ford, Standard Oil/Esso/Exxon, Kolberg Kravis Roberts, and Facebook/Meta—it is very readable and incredibly illuminating with respect to the every-shifting tense and fraught relationships of private profit and public purpose.
ONE AUDIO: Learning from Past Fights with Inflation
Brad DeLong & Ray Suarez: Learning From Past Fights With Inflation <https://overcast.fm/+TYi3Mv01k>: ‘Economist Brad DeLong was feeling optimistic in February 2022, because inflation truly did appear transitory. Weeks later, Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine, sending price shocks through the global economy. The latest numbers indicate inflation is slowing, but people around the world are still feeling the sting. While the US has it better than most, no one is immune from the global economic slump. So what does inflation mean for our pocketbooks, and for our mental health? Ray Suarez speaks with DeLong about why a little bit of inflation may be good for the economy, but also signals to service-sector and middle class workers that the system isn’t working for them…
ONE IMAGE: Lean Against Bigger Firms with Run-Up Stock Prices in Your Portfolio!
“Small cap” and “value” factor outperformance is a durable thing:
Very Briefly Noted:
Joachim Klement: Equal weighting works, but why?: ‘Alexander Swade and his colleagues…. The biggest contribution to the difference in returns between equal-weighted and market cap-weighted S&P 500 comes from the small cap bias. This bias is about three times as important as the value bias inherent in the equal-weighted index...
David Sirota: Ending The Social Security Tax Break For The Rich: ‘Joe Manchin just endorsed a Social Security proposal championed by progressives for two decades — will Biden seize the opportunity?…
Noah Smith: Repost: Distributed service-sector productivity…
John Gruber: ChatGPT: The First True Threat to Google Search?: ‘Dave Winer: “I went to ChatGPT and entered ‘Simple instructions about how to send email from a Node.js app?’ What came back was absolutely perfect, none of the confusing crap and business models you see in online instructions in Google. I see why Google is worried. ;-)”…
Microsoft Corporate: Microsoft and OpenAI extend partnership: ‘Today, we are announcing the third phase of our long-term partnership with OpenAI through a multiyear, multibillion dollar investment…. Supercomputing at scale…. New AI-powered experiences…. Exclusive cloud provider…
Duncan Black: The Real Story: ‘Not just a corrupt, but Russian agent infiltrated NYC FBI obvious went all out to swing the 2016 election, aided by America's Greatest Man, James Comey…. Others know the details better than I do… includ[ing] high profile journalists, who aren't talking…
John Ganz: Reading, Watching 01.15: ‘The defining feature of Trumpism, starting from Birtherism, was its hostility to the citizenship of its designated enemies. For me, the most disturbing thing the Trump administration contemplated was a reversal of birthright citizenship…
Logan Baker: Hands-On: A Mechanical Watch Fanatic Reviews The Apple Watch Ultra: ‘The increase in size doesn't bother me, none of the negatives are dealbreakers, and the list of positives is nearly endless. The Apple Watch Ultra's increased durability, assortment of impressive new features that range from amusing to life-saving, and improved battery life make the decision a simple one. The Ultra is simply a beast…
Ben Thompson: https://stratechery.com/2023/an-interview-with-michael-nathanson-about-netflix-and-the-media-industry/ An Interview with Michael Nathanson About Netflix and the Media Industry…
Manu: Why Elon Musk and the billionaire space bros want to put people in space cages forever…
Cody on Chain: ChatGPT Beginner To Pro in 10 Minutes…
Ray Suarez: On Shifting Ground: ‘Geopolitical turmoil. A warming planet. Authoritarians on the rise. We live in a chaotic world that’s rapidly shifting around us. “On Shifting Ground with Ray Suarez” explores international fault lines and how they impact us all. Each week, NPR veteran Ray Suarez hosts conversations with journalists, leaders and policy experts to help us read between the headlines—and give us hope for human resilience. A co-production of World Affairs and KQED…
¶s:
Ricardo Hausman: Why Industrial Policy Is Back: ‘Industrial policies are not about picking winners, but about ensuring that the supply of public goods enhances productivity as much as possible. Because they cannot rely on the invisible hand of the market to coordinate the actions of thousands of public agencies and the effects of millions of pages of legislation, governments must be embedded and engaged…. None of this is to say that every government should imitate the expensive policies that seem to be in vogue these days. Policymakers should focus on their countries’ current problems and choose the most appropriate solutions. Copying other countries’ solutions to problems you do not have, or focusing on trendy issues that are not really important, is a recipe for inefficiency, if not disaster…. Diversifying into new industries—a key goal in many countries— requires identifying the public goods that these industries require and helping them through the learning process…
Martin Sandbu: Free Lunch: Norway’s exodus of billionaires: ‘Norway has had a net wealth tax for a very long time and remains one of few countries that still levy one. But it has recently gone up. The centre-left government that came into power in late 2021 has raised the rate from 0.85 per cent to 1.1 per cent on the largest fortunes, and reduced the valuation discount for stocks.… I have little sympathy for the tax exiles’ complaints. It is an honest if unadmirable matter to want to pay less tax. But the golden goose defence is not credible…. I find it astonishing that, to my knowledge, there has been no consideration in Norway of taking a leaf from the US book and tie the wealth tax to citizenship instead of just residence…
Matt Yglesias: Republicans can't even explain what they're trying to do with the debt ceiling: ‘Republicans are trying to hold a negotiation about this, but they don’t actually have a negotiating position. Everyone has agreed amongst themselves that passing a clean debt limit would be a kind of cuck move and they don’t want to do it. But they don’t really know why they don’t want to do it other than that nobody wants to surrender, and I think they have a vague sense that “bad stuff happening” would be bad for Joe Biden…. I don’t really think that leverage exists. We’re hurtling toward a very chaotic legal and constitutional situation for no real reason…
Yglesias/Debt Ceiling; I wish that Biden would at leas go through the motions of proposing defect reduction through more progressive taxation in the context of the debt ceiling. It ought to help a tiny bit at least in the politics of the stand off and sets up the issue in the funding debate in September. The actual resolution ought to be Biden reluctantly has to ignore one of two contradictory laws.
Timothy Snyder has a longish substack about the FBI corruption scandal which is worth reading: https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-specter-of-2016.
[...]
The Russian influence campaign was an issue for American counterintelligence. It is worth pausing to understand why, since it helps us to see the centrality of McGonigal and the meaning of this scandal. Intelligence is about trying to understand. Counterintelligence is about making that hard for others. Branching out from counterintelligence are the more exotic operations designed to make an enemy not only misunderstand the situation, but also act on the basis of misunderstandings, against the enemy's own interests. Such operations, which have been a Russian (or Soviet) specialty for more than a century, go under the name of "provocation," or "active measures," or "maskirovka." It is the task of counterintelligence to understand active measures, and prevent them from working. The Russian influence operation on behalf of Trump was an active measure that the United States failed to halt. The cyber element, the use of social media, is what McGonigal personally, with his background and in his position, should have been making everyone aware of. In 2016, McGonigal was section chief of the FBI's Cyber-Counterintelligence Coordination Section ...
... There were two moments, late in the presidential campaign, that decided the matter for Donald Trump. The first was when Russian rescued him from the Access Hollywood scandal (7 October). The second was FBI director James Comey's public announcement that he was reopening the investigation of Hillary Clinton's emails (28 October). The reason Comey made that public announcement at that highly sensitive time, ten days before the election, was not that he believed the public needed to know, nor that the matter was likely of great consequence. On his account, it was that he believed that FBI New York office was going to leak it anyway ...
It looked at the time like Comey had been played by people in FBI New York who wanted Trump to win. Comey has now confirmed this, although his word choice might be different. And I did wonder, back then, if those special agents in New York, in turn, were being played. It was no secret at the time that FBI special agents in New York did not like Hillary Clinton. Making emotional commitments public is asking to be exploited. For people working in counterintelligence, this is a particularly unwise thing to do. The nature of working in counterintelligence is that, if you are not very good, you will find yourself in the vortex of someone else's active measure. Someone else will take advantage of your known vulnerabilities - your misogyny, perhaps, or your hatred of a specific female politician, or your entirely unjustified belief that a male politician is a patriotic messiah -- and get you to do something that feels like your own decision.
[...]
The charges have not been proven. If they are, it would be a bit surprising if the two offenses with which McGonigal is now charged were isolated events. There is a certain danger, apparently, in seeing them this way, and letting bygones be bygones. A U.S. attorney presenting the case said that McGonigal "should have known better"; that is the kind of thing one says when a child gets a bellyache after eating too much cotton candy at the county fair; it hardly seems to correspond to the gravity of the situation ...