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 f
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.
re Furman and Powell's "the labor market has a way to go before it is healed"... I am not an economist, but isn't this such an understatement as to seem uninformed? Isn't a healthy labor market becoming less and less likely by the month, as employers automate, automated sectors grow faster than all others, and there is no plan for retraining the unemployed? Those not in "knowledge jobs" stand to lose their employment, permanently, and COVID-19 has only accelerated the process. What is really being done to help the ever-growing number of marginally employable in this time of rapid change?
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.
re Furman and Powell's "the labor market has a way to go before it is healed"... I am not an economist, but isn't this such an understatement as to seem uninformed? Isn't a healthy labor market becoming less and less likely by the month, as employers automate, automated sectors grow faster than all others, and there is no plan for retraining the unemployed? Those not in "knowledge jobs" stand to lose their employment, permanently, and COVID-19 has only accelerated the process. What is really being done to help the ever-growing number of marginally employable in this time of rapid change?