BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-05-07 Fr
Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember...
First:
Kevin Kwok: Populism: 'We have lived in the golden era provided by the industrial revolution in so many ways that we take for granted. One of them is that the industrial revolution was an innately distributed wave. It was a huge technological, productivity, and financial wave. But it required a large base of humans. This is because its returns to scale tilted towards many mid to large cities co-located with transportation and natural resource hubs. And labor was a major factor of production. This was not the sole factor, but one of the major ones for why we see a middle class arise in the world. Before the industrial revolution we see far greater inequality, with elites capturing far more power and wealth.... The question then, is whether we are living through the reversion to the mean..... Another macro trend... for the last 75 years, the US has been an anomalous market by absorbing value from the rest of the world... Platform Americana. By rejecting the full stack nature of the European Colonial Approach and instead becoming a platform–the US struck a bargain with the rest of the world. It would provide the production, consumption, guarantee of trade routes, security, and financing for the world. Our middle class is a function of the value that was supposed to be generated in the rest of the world that we captured as the platform for world.... To be in the US then, appears akin to sitting on a beach watching the waves flow back to the ocean.... We’re seeing a similar dynamic... playing out... with blue-collar white males.... centuries because of legal, cultural, and fiat norms around women.... The adage “Growth solves all problems” is not just true of companies. It’s true of countries too. With growth, people believe in cooperation. They find common ground in the pursuit of mutual success and growth. Without growth, people become zero sum…
LINK: <https://kwokchain.com/2018/10/02/populism/>
Very Briefly Noted:
Timothy Snyder: The Confessions of Vladimir Putin…<https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-confessions-of-vladimir-putin-ac5>
Maia: Convergence, Bigtime <https://someunpleasant.substack.com/p/convergence-big-time?>
Steven Vogel: Level-Up, America!: The Case for Industrial Policy, & How to Do It Right <https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/article-vogel-level-up.pdf>
Neil J. Cornish: The Lagrange Points <https://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/ContentMedia/lagrange.pdf>
Wikipedia: Thomas the Rhymer <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_the_Rhymer>
David Dam & al.: Many Small Businesses in the Services Sector Are Unlikely to Reopen <https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2021/05/many-small-businesses-in-the-services-sector-are-unlikely-to-reopen.html>
xkcd: Blagofaire <https://xkcd.com/239/>
Ken MacLeod: The Cassini Division <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Cassini_Division/DjYK5Y5p60UC>
Adam Tooze: Shutdown <https://randomhouse.app.box.com/s/ubhx8fktns5e7becaugc16y6bcyh6c9o>
Dan Pfeiffer: Banning Trump from Facebook Won’t Solve the Problem: ‘ Even without Trump, Facebook is a cesspool of dangerous conspiracy theories… <https://messagebox.substack.com/p/keeping-trump-off-facebook-is-only>
David Becker: Sydney Powell: ‘No reasonable person" could conclude my lies about the election were fact.’ Joe DiGenova: Publicly apologizes for slandering former CISA Dir. @C_C_Krebs who confirmed the 2020 election was the most secure in history. Now Newsmax… <https://twitter.com/beckerdavidj/status/1389232789833326596>
One Video:
Thread-of-Threads:
BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021–05–05 We: Joe Biden: ’I think they’re going to write about this point in history… about whether or not democracy can function in the 21st century. Not a joke… <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/briefly-noted-for-2021-05-05-we>
PROJECT SYNDICATE: Is þe US Economy Recovering or Overheating?: ‘An absence of price increases would reflect an economy that is still struggling… <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/project-syndicate-is-e-us-economy>
PODCAST: Hexapodia XIII: “Mandated Interoperability”: We Can’t Make It Work, or Can We?: Cory Doctorow is AWESOME!… We once, with the creation of the market economy, got interoperability right. But now the political economy blocks us… <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/podcast-hexapodia-xiii-mandated-interoperability>
BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021–05–02 Suy: Zeynep Tufekci… ’Sociologically, I am shaken… <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/briefly-noted-for-2021-05-03-su>
HOISTED FROM ÞE ARCHIVES: Five Books on þe Classical Economists (2020–09–29): They were an eclectic bunch, including, among others, a stock market speculator, a moral philosopher, a cleric, a lawyer and a journalist… LINK: <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/hoisted-from-the-archives-five-books>
HOISTED FROM ÞE ARCHIVES: Lessons from þe New Deal (2009–03–31): Earlier today Eric Rauchway @rauchway wrote that people should take a look at my 2009–03–31 testimony that Sen Sherrod Brown (D-OH) invited me to give. He is right: my 2009–03–31 testimony is damned good!… <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/lessons-from-the-new-deal-2009-03>
Paragraphs:
Minxin Pei: China: Totalitarianism’s Long Shadow: ‘Rapid economic growth in China over the last four decades has failed to bring about democratization. Instead of undergoing evolutionary liberalization, the Leninist party-state has in recent years reverted to a form of neo-Stalinist rule. China’s experience may appear to contradict modernization theory, which links economic development with democracy. A closer look at this experience, however, shows that democratizing a post-totalitarian regime is far more difficult than democratizing an authoritarian regime because post-totalitarian regimes, such as the one dominated by the Chinese Communist Party, possess far greater capacity and resources to resist and neutralize the liberalizing effects of modernization. However, the medium-term success of these regimes may only ensure their eventual demise through revolution. The socioeconomic transformation of societies under post-totalitarian rule empowers social forces and greatly increase the odds of revolutionary change when these regimes undergo liberalization, as shown in the former Soviet bloc…
LINK: <https://journalofdemocracy.org/articles/china-totalitarianisms-long-shadow/>
Scott Lemieux: Retweets Are Not Endorsements, but Positive Comments About the Isolated Actions of Otherwise Bad Conservative Politicians Are Proposals of Marriage: ‘Prticularly ridiculous… Jack Shafer has a column entitled “How Democrats Learned to Love the Cheneys”…. “Just listen to the ridiculous lionizing. ‘Liz Cheney’s Profile in Courage’ said the headline of an April 28 Charlie Sykes piece in the Bulwark. ‘She Kind of Reminds You of Margaret Thatcher,’ one Republican member of Congress told POLITICO’s Alex Thompson late last year. ‘How Liz Cheney Became the Conscience of Republicans,’ CNN’s Chris Cillizza wrote in mid-January. ‘Did Liz Cheney Risk Everything to Impeach Trump?’ Cillizza asked later that month. ‘Liz Cheney Praised for Impeachment ‘Courage’ but Risks Pro-Trump Ire,’ the Financial Times, late January. ’Liz Cheney Speaks Out After Failed GOP Effort to Oust Her from Leadership for Impeachment Vote,’ People, February. ‘Liz Cheney is a hero for standing up for the truth,’ insisted Representative Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), during impeachment proceedings. And so on.” So, to summarize: Conservative… Charlie Sykes. A Republican member of Congress…. Walking punchline and man who wrote several dozen stories about Hillary Clinton’s EMAILS! before the first Democratic primary debate in 2015 Chris Cillizza. Trotskyist newsletter The Financial Times. Peoplemagazine. And… finally one actual Democratic congressman, praising her specific actions during an impeachment hearing. This is truly pathetic stuff—transparently dumb guilt-by-association arguments that can only identify one actual example of even association… a master class in how to be a hack…
Michèle A. Flournoy: How to Transform the Pentagon for a Competitive Era: ‘For almost a decade, U.S. defense officials have deemed the return of great-power competition to be the most consequential challenge to U.S. national security…. The Pentagon’s own war games reportedly show that current force plans would leave the military unable to deter and defeat Chinese aggression in the future. The Defense Department’s leadership, accordingly, must take much bigger and bolder steps to maintain the United States’ military and technological edge over great-power competitors. Otherwise, the U.S. military risks losing that edge within a decade, with profound and unsettling implications for the United States, for its allies and partners, and for the world.…
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I liked the Alchian piece. So, it turns out that lithium batteries are an offshoot of the development of the hydrogen bomb. We use a lot more metals nowadays than we did back in the 1940s. Metals like titanium, americium, cobalt and the like are now important commodities. Having picked up a copy of The Rare Metals Handbook, circa 1970, I couldn't help noticing that so many required a combination of chemical and electrical extraction. Since then, electrical extraction seems to have taken over, even in the reduction of iron. Once again, the demand for a material led to new processing technologies that opened even more avenues for improving a broad variety of processes. I doubt that Teller, Ulam and the rest of the gang were thinking of cordless power drills, laptop computers or electric cars when they considered using lithium, but now we have them all the same.
P.S. No one seems to make industrial promotional films anymore. Where's my Marvelous Lithium? I searched Youtube. Surely we have not lost our sense of wonder.
Link to 5/12 page broken - pointing to here - 5/07. This needs to be fixed as it seems to be a recurring problem.