BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-05-19 We
Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember...
First:
Even though she is endorsed by Ross Douthat, Angela Nagle seems to me to be a remarkably silly person. She “hoped or expected… Trump” would “adopt… national economic revival policies”. And now she is surprised that the hated “Libs” are enacting such policies, have “gone much further with them”, and “these are good policies”. In spite of huge amounts of evidence, she has not yet been able to open her eyes and realize that Donald Trump is a grifter who does not care about anything other than staying out of jail and owning the media cycle. Expecting him to lead a national economic revival was really stupid.
Did I hint that it is surprising that someone endorsed by Ross Douthat is remarkably silly? My bad. That start should be: “Since she is endorsed by Ross Douthat, it is no surprise that Angela Nagle seems to me to be a remarkably silly person”:
Angela Nagle: How The Libs Owned Us All: ‘Their policy proposals have included major national infrastructure spending, including expanding the train system, a capital gains tax increase and a withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. Whether they fulfill these promises is another question, I know. I have to be honest though. These are good policies. Sorry. This does leave the remaining Trump inspired populist right in a new and somewhat awkward position. While they have spent the last four years talking about abandoning Reaganomics and becoming critics of the free market, the libs have already adopted national economic revival policies you might have hoped or expected from Trump himself and have gone much further with them…
LINK: <https://angelanagle.substack.com/p/how-the-libs-owned-us-all>
Very Briefly Noted:
Josiah Ober: Democracy and Knowledge <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Democracy_and_Knowledge/Jge0MlZTKhQC?hl=en&gbpv=0>
Google: Chevauchée <https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=chevauchee&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8>
Soulver: Soulver 3 for Mac <https://documentation.soulver.app/documentation/untitled-1>
Wikipedia: Warren Hastings: ‘Maharaja Nandakumar… <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Hastings#Impeachment>
Google: Peine Forte et Dure <https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=pressing+with+stones&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8>
James H. Stock & Mark W. Watson: Phillips Curve Inflation Forecasts: ‘Inflation is hard to forecast… <https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/stock/files/forecastinginflation.pdf>
Wikipedia: Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission: ‘Bill Thomas (vice chairman) – jointly chosen as vice chair by Boehner and McConnell…. Keith Hennessey (McConnell)…. Douglas Holtz-Eakin (McConnell)…. Peter J. Wallison (Boehner)… <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Crisis_Inquiry_Commission#Composition>
William Best: ‘Lord Coke had no authority for what he states, but I am afraid we should get rid of a great deal of what is considered law in Westminster hall, if what Lord Coke says without authority is not law… <https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/shepherd-selected-writings-of-sir-edward-coke-vol-i>
Paragraphs:
Wow. San Francisco Bay turns out to be a uniquely powerful global brand! We will give the Pearl River Bay a heavy workout, win or lose. Let the games begin!:
JDSupra: China’s Greater Bay Area Puts Hong Kong in the Lead as Super Connector to the World: ‘The country is now building a landmark megalopolis on its southern coast with the name the “Greater Bay Area” (the “GBA”)… connect[ing] Hong Kong with 11 surrounding cities in southern China including Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Macau. The GBA’s super economy is comparable to the economy of the San Francisco Bay Area and the projected total GDP is expected to reach US$4.6 trillion by 2030…. With a total area of approximately 56,000km2 closely connected by highways, high speed railways and ports and a population of approximately 67 million people, the GBA is expected to strengthen the cooperation among the cities within it to maximize their own existing advantages in building a large-scale and vibrant city cluster…
LINK: <https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/china-s-greater-bay-area-puts-hong-kong-30979/>
Liz Cheney appears to have given up on being a politician. She seems to have decided that—since the future is unpredictable—she will do what is right, in one area at least:
Josh Marshall: Cheney’s Media Blitz: ‘Cheney told Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace that Trump “continues to be a real danger” for his continued efforts to delegitimize the election process…. “People… [now] believe that they can’t count on our electoral process to actually convey the will of the people…. We have to be a nation of laws. If you reject the rulings of the courts, if you work against the rulings of our courts, then you really are at war with the Constitution. And he is a continuing danger to our system.” Cheney expressed her dismay over the former president misleading the millions of people who support him. “They’ve been betrayed,” Cheney said. “And certainly as we see his continued action to attack our democracy, his continued refusal to accept the results of the last election, you see that ongoing danger”…
LINK: <https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/cheney-sunday-show-interviews-gop-leadership-ouster>
Homelessness is continuous with a number of things—with housing policy being one very important dimension, but not the only dimension. Whether “the forces pushing you out… come up on you slowly” or not is important only if you have, as so much of the United States does, a nonviable crippled social-welfare system:
Matt Yglesias: Homelessness Is About Housing: ‘Something that I took for granted in one section of “Some Thoughts on Faculty Lounge Politics” that I realize not everyone knows or agrees with is that homelessness is fundamentally continuous with general housing policy…. It misconstrues the problem as a “homelessness” problem with primary adjacencies to mental health, addiction services, and law enforcement. I think it’s a housing problem with primary adjacencies to questions like “why was New York City’s population falling even before the pandemic?”…. People can leave cities for all kinds of reasons, after all, but most of them would come down to “it became a worse place to live.” But what you expect to see if somewhere becomes a worse place to live is that the price of living there falls thanks to low demand. But what we actually observed was a strong increase in rents over the decade. Rather than New York becoming a worse place to live, it became a more expensive place to live…. Unusually high levels of homelessness and unusually low levels of vacancy are both caused by the same thing — scarcity of dwellings…. We think of the “homeless person” and the “moved to North Carolina to be closer to family and also to afford more space for the kids” as two entirely different types of people. But it’s a single underlying phenomenon. And who ends up in which category will come down to a mix of luck, whether or not you do in fact have family in North Carolina, and whether or not the forces pushing you out of the high-cost area come up on you slowly so you have time to plan…
I believe the Fed is correct here. But time will tell:
Steve Matthews: Fed Officials Have Six Reasons to Bet Inflation Spike Will Pass: ‘Acceleration in U.S. price growth this year will have “only transitory effects on underlying inflation,” Fed Vice Chair Richard Clarida said Wednesday. Governor Lael Brainard said the day before that officials should be “patient though the transitory surge.” Powell has made the same argument…. Measures of expected inflation suggest price gains… [after] the next year or so… [will] drop back to more normal levels….. Powell said… “It seems unlikely, frankly, that we would see inflation moving up in a persistent way that would actually move inflation expectations up while there was still significant slack in the labor market”…. The sticky-price index rose a modest 2.4% over 12 months through April…. A number of structural factors have led to global disinflation over the past three decades…. Outside of passing on commodities prices, most U.S. firms remain reluctant to raise prices on other goods…. Business survey shows limited price increases over next 5–10 years…. “Base effects will contribute… to core inflation in April and May,” Powell said… “and they’ll disappear”…
It is not just that the engineers who design and the engineers and technicians who manufacture the Apple Silicon M1 are very good. It is that the engineers who program the internal guts of MacOS are very good too:
Jim Salter: Apple’s M1 is a Fast CPU—but M1 Macs Feel Even Faster Due to QoS: ‘When Oakley noticed how frequently Mac users praised M1 Macs for feeling incredibly fast—despite performance measurements that don’t always back those feelings up—he took a closer look at macOS native task scheduling…. The lower-priority tasks… [were] slower on the M1 Mac than the Intel Mac…. Operations with higher QoS settings… performed more consistently on the M1 than Intel Mac—macOS’s willingness to dump lower-priority tasks onto the Icestorm cores only left the higher-performance Firestorm cores unloaded and ready to respond both rapidly and consistently when userInitiated and userInteractive tasks needed handling. Apple’s QoS strategy for the M1 Mac is an excellent example of engineering for the actual pain point in a workload rather than chasing arbitrary metrics…. Big Sur certainly could employ the same strategy with an eight-core Intel processor…. What makes the Apple M1 feel so fast isn’t the fact that four of its cores are slower than the others—it’s the operating system’s willingness to sacrifice maximum throughput in favor of lower task latency. It’s also worth noting that the interactivity improvements M1 Mac users are seeing rely heavily on tasks being scheduled properly in the first place…
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I wouldn't say that Liz Cheney has given up on being a politician. I think her stance here is very consciously political: she wants to portray herself as Margaret Thatcher ("the lady is not for turning"). I have no idea if this will work, but I think she's well aware of how she intends to try to capitalize on her action.
"Even though she is endorsed by Ross Douthat,"
ok you got me there. I won't say I read that paragraph, but I looked closely enough to find the disclaimer.