BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2020-11-25 We
Bibliotheca Augustana: Tapetum Bagianum http://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/Chronologia/Lspost11/Bayeux/bay_tama.html: ‘c. 1080…
Bret Devereaux: Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers! https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-farmers/…
Bret Devereaux: Collections: Iron, How Did They Make It? Part I, Mining https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-mining/…
Wikipedia: Pioneer Hi Bred International https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Hi_Bred_International…
Wikipedia: DeKalb Genetics Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeKalb_Genetics_Corporation…
Steven Rattner: God Help Us if Judy Shelton Joins the Fed https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/opinion/federal-reserve-judy-shelton.html?smid=tw-share: ‘Trump’s latest unqualified nominee to the Federal Reserve Board must be rejected...
Jeremiah: 22 KJV https://biblehub.com/kjv/jeremiah/22.htm: ‘Thus saith the LORD: "Execute ye judgment and righteousness, and deliver the spoiled out of the hand of the oppressor: and do no wrong, do no violence to the stranger, the fatherless, nor the widow, neither shed innocent blood in this place. For if ye do this thing indeed, then shall there enter in by the gates of this house kings sitting upon the throne of David, riding in chariots and on horses, he, and his servants, and his people. But if ye will not hear these words, I swear by myself", saith the LORD, "that this house shall become a desolation." For thus saith the LORD unto the king's house of Judah: "Thou art Gilead unto me, and the head of Lebanon: yet surely I will make thee a wilderness, and cities which are not inhabited. And I will prepare destroyers against thee, every one with his weapons: and they shall cut down thy choice cedars, and cast them into the fire. And many nations shall pass by this city, and they shall say every man to his neighbour, 'Wherefore hath the LORD done thus unto this great city?' Then they shall answer, 'Because they have forsaken the covenant of the LORD their God, and worshipped other gods, and served them'"…
Duncan Black: Failed 4th Estate https://www.eschatonblog.com/2020/11/failed-4th-estate.html: ‘I think the very Trump-specific sin of the media (as opposed to their normal sinning) was confusing an understandable decision to "treat this lunatic freakazoid as we would normally treat a president" with "go out of our way to portray this lunatic freakazoid as normal." I get it. It was difficult to do the first part without doing the second part. If the scandal-o-meter goes up to 7 on a tan suit, then anything resembling normal practices can't cope when Trump makes it hit 11 by 7am most days. And, who knows, maybe they didn't even do him any favors. Maybe The People love their lunatic freakazoid president. But the first draft of history has hardly been an accurate one…
Utah HERO Project: Covid-Research State Chart https://marriner.eccles.utah.edu/covid-research-state-chart/…
Joan Robinson (1962): Economic Philosophy …
Bret Devereaux: Collections: Iron, How Did They Make It? Part I, Mining https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-mining/…
Oliver Wyman: Model Projections for COVID-19 Cases https://pandemicnavigator.oliverwyman.com/forecast?mode=country®ion=United%20States&panel=baseline…
On 2017-12-17, Michael Boskin claimed the TMR tax cut would generate a big boom in equipment investment. Perhaps a full percentage point or so. None of the model-builders agreed with him. And he was wrong: there was none such in 2018 or 2019; spending did not wheel from consumption to investment; “unlocked” foreign earnings were paid out in dividends, not invested in equipment. He has never explained or analyzed why he was wrong. Or why he was confident in the first place: Michael Boskin (29017): Another Look at Tax Reform and Economic Growth__https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/republican-tax-plan-growth-effects-by-michael-boskin-2017-12…
100+ Economists (2017): Pass tax reform and watch the economy roar https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-tax-reform-opinion-congress-pass-2017-11…
Stan Sakai: Usagi Yojimbo https://www.usagiyojimbo.com/: ‘First published in 1984, [it] continues to this day. Usagi Yojimbo is one of the longest independent serialized comic book series in existence. Stan Sakai, the sole creator, author, and artist who is best known for his series Usagi Yojimbo, the epic saga of Miyamoto Usagi, a samurai rabbit living in late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth-century Japan. Since then, Stan Sakai has received numerous awards for Usagi Yojimbo including the National Cartoonists Society Award, multiple Eisner Awards, the Parents' Choice Award, and Harvey Award for Best Cartoonist…
An unprofessional beat sweetener about a Trumpism lobbyist who could neither plan nor execute a successful trade war: Jim Zarroli (2019): China Trade Talks: USTR Robert Lighthizer Is Trump's Hardball-Playing Negotiator https://www.npr.org/2019/02/21/696277594/expect-change-robert-lighthizer-is-trump-s-hardball-playing-china-trade-negotiat…
John Gruber: One More Thing: The M1 Macs https://daringfireball.net/2020/11/one_more_thing_the_m1_macs: ‘The M1. The new M1-based MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini are... three different manifestations of the same computer... far faster machines than the Intel-based Macs they’re replacing. But the big win, and clear focus from Apple, isn’t speed but battery life.... This is the sellable bullet point for the mass market consumer.... The M1 really is an entire system on a chip. Everything is on the M1. The various processors, of course: the CPU cores, the GPU cores, the Neural Engine cores. But everything else is on the M1 too: the storage controller, the Secure Enclave, the memory controller, and, yes, the memory itself. The DRAM for M1-based Macs is on the package (“on the substrate”, I believe, is the technical lingo).... There’s no separate “video memory” and “system memory”—just memory.... Apple’s chip team is really proud of this UMA system and the integrated GPU on the M1. It’s a design that increases performance and power efficiency.... For over a decade, iPhones and iPads have had Apple-designed chips the competition could not and still cannot match. Now the Mac does too…
Sara Gibbs: Everything I Never Wanted to Have to Know About Labour & Antisemitismm https://medium.com/@sararoseofficial/everything-i-never-wanted-to-have-to-know-about-labour-and-antisemitism-649b5bc1e576: ‘I want the last four years of my life back.... If you’re new to this and listening, thank you. I know a lot of my fellow activists will be annoyed that I’m taking this tone but at this point I am so exhausted from four years of begging people to listen on this subject that I am grateful for any new allies and support. If you are listening, you’re already doing more than most. One of the most devastating aspects of Labour’s antisemitism crisis has been seeing the sheer volume of people I like, respect, even consider friends, denying or minimising this issue which has caused me so much personal devastation…
A huge amount—an absolutely huge amount—was lost when Harry Dexter White overrode John Maynard Keynes at Bretton Woods and placed responsibility for closing "fundamental disequilibria" on deficit countries alone. This policy mistake still haunts us. And odds are that it is about to haunt us again. Jeremy Bulow and Company sound the alarm: Jeremy Bulow & al.: The Debt Pandemic https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2020/09/debt-pandemic-reinhart-rogoff-bulow-trebesch.htm: ‘The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly lengthened the list of developing and emerging market economies in debt distress. For some, a crisis is imminent. For many more, only exceptionally low global interest rates may be delaying a reckoning.... Yet new challenges may hamper debt workouts unless governments and multilateral lenders provide better tools to navigate a wave of restructuring…
*Neil Fligstein & Steve Vogel *: Political Economy After Neoliberalism http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/neil-fligstein-steven-vogel-political-economy-after-neoliberalism: ‘First, then, governments and markets are co-constituted. Government regulation is not an intrusion into the market but rather a prerequisite for a functioning market economy.... Second, real-world political economy hinges on power, both political and market power. Specific forms of market governance—of the kinds we just sketched—do not arise naturally or innocently. They are the product of power struggles between firms, industries, workers, and governments within particular markets and in the political arena.... Third, there is more than one way to organize society to achieve economic growth, equity, and access to valued goods and services. The balance of power between government, workers, and firms differs greatly across countries and time…
Rachel Reeves: Best for Britain https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1288825505333030923: ‘The PM said… a trade deal would be secured by the end of July. Well… we don’t have a trade deal. All we have is a blueprint for a giant lorry park in the middle of Kent…
Alan S. Blinder & Mark W. Watson (2016): Presidents & the US Economy: An Econometric Exploration https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.20140913: ‘The US economy has performed better when the president of the United States is a Democrat rather than a Republican, almost regard- less of how one measures performance. For many measures, includ- ing real GDP growth (our focus), the performance gap is large and significant. This paper asks why. The answer is not found in technical time series matters nor in systematically more expansionary mone- tary or fiscal policy under Democrats. Rather, it appears that the Democratic edge stems mainly from more benign oil shocks, supe- rior total factor productivity (TFP) performance, a more favorable international environment, and perhaps more optimistic consumer expectations about the near-term future…
Wikipedia_: Cocoliztli Epidemics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoliztli_epidemics: ‘A mysterious illness characterized by high fevers and bleeding. It ravaged the Mexican highlands in epidemic proportions... often referred to as the worst disease epidemic in the history of Mexico.... Recent bacterial genomic studies have suggested that.. a serotype of Salmonella enterica known as Paratyphi C, was at least partially responsible for this initial outbreak.[3] It might have also been an indigenous viral hemorrhagic fever
Paul Krugman: Why Did Trump’s Trade War Fail? https://www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-Graduate-Center/PDF/Programs/Economics/Other%20docs/tradewarfail.pdf: ‘There used to be an extensive literature on “effective protection”.... Tariffs on imported inputs provided negative effective protection to downstream activities. And that’s what seems to have happened with the Trump trade war. Tariffs were largely focused on intermediate rather than final goods. The net effect, then, may actually have been to discourage manufacturing!…
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Plus: Kevin Drum: Why Are Republicans Being Such Assholes?s https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/07/why-are-republicans-being-such-assholes/: ‘Bonus unemployment payments... expire today.... The main reason for extending them is because there are millions of Americans who are out of work and they desperately need the money.... [Plus] if the payments are cut off it will devastate an already ravaged economy.... So why are Republicans hemming and hawing?... From a purely selfish perspective, Republicans ought to be in favor of doing anything they can to keep the economy in decent shape through the election.... The whole thing is a disgrace.... Why are Republicans acting so contemptibly?…
Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson & Mark Vandevelde: Stephen Schwarzman Defended Donald Trump at CEO Meeting on Election Results https://www.ft.com/content/558f2a68-7d42-4702-b86d-fae5458b3e64: ‘Mr Schwarzman, a Republican donor who has been one of Mr Trump’s most energetic supporters on Wall Street, sought to assuage such fears, saying the president was within his rights to challenge election results and forecasting that the legal process would take its course. He asked whether other participants did not find it surprising that early votes in Pennsylvania had favoured Mr Trump, only for later counts to tip the state in Mr Biden’s favour. Mr Schwarzman said there had been news reports stating that ballots continued arriving days after the election and that some of them may not have been real—issues, he said, that needed to be resolved by the courts, as the president’s legal team has argued…
.#brieflynoted #noted #2020-11-25