BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-01-06 Fr
Things þt Went Whizzing by: CONDITION: BLS Employment Report. MUST-READ: Lauren Boebert! ONE IMAGE: The Schumpeterian Shifts since 1969: From Industry to ???. ONE AUDIO: Understanding U.S. Inflation..
CONDITION: BLS Employment Report:
A Goldilocks economy:
BLS: Household Survey Data: The unemployment rate edged down to 3.5 percent in December and has remained in a narrow range of 3.5 percent to 3.7 percent since March. The number of unemployed persons edged down to 5.7 million in December…. Whites… 3.0 percent… teenagers (10.4 percent), Blacks (5.7 percent), Asians (2.4 percent), and Hispanics (4.1 percent)…. Long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) declined by 146,000 to 1.1 million in December… down from 2.0 million a year earlier…. The employment-population ratio increased by 0.2 percentage point over the month to 60.1 percent. The labor force participation rate was little changed at 62.3 percent. Both measures have shown little net change since early 2022.
Establishment Survey Data: Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 223,000 in December. Notable job gains occurred in leisure and hospitality, health care, construction, and social assistance….
In December, average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls rose by 9 cents, or 0.3 percent, to $32.82. Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings have increased by 4.6 percent…
MUST-READ: Lauren Boebert!:
To whom was this speech addressed? Why was it delivered? What advantage was it supposed to gain her?
Clerk: For what purpose does the gentlewoman from Colorado rise?
Lauren Boebert: Madam clerk, I rise to nominate Mr. Hern as Speaker of the House.
Clerk: The gentlewoman is recognized.
Lauren Boebert: Thank you, madam clerk.
We have been accused of not having a plan. well, we presented many, many plans and are even presenting two plans simultaneously right now for Speaker of the people's House—of the people's House.
I sat in my chair anticipating to vote for Byron Donalds, who whom I respect, whom I see as a leader, and there was a gut check that said: we need someone that is going to convince my colleagues on this side of the aisle that it's time to get that—it's time to get going, It's time to build momentum. Many of you have said it.
You see that Kevin McCarthy does not have the votes. You are understanding that he is not going to get there. We have the votes for him. I cannot produce those anymore. The colleagues that i brought with me to offer those 218 votes on the first ballot aren't there anymore. It is not happening. And, as has been said, we need to get to a point where we start evaluating what life after Kevin McCarthy looks like.
America doesn't want more talk. and I am going to keep my speech a little short. They want action. I'll take that. I want to get to work, too. America's tired of rhetoric and they want results. This isn't chaos. This is a constitutional republic at work. I am a mom of four boys. I know what chaos and dysfunction looks like. This is actually really a beautiful thing to be here with all of my colleagues debating, just as the gentleman from Montana said, we have not experienced this in the two years that we have served here in Washington, D.C. This is the most debate that has taken place, and I love it. I love the conversations that are going on the floor, in the cloakroom, in the halls. There's nothing extreme. There's nothing unreasonable. We are trying to get this right. As my conservative colleagues and I have stated time and time again, congress is broken and fundamentally needs change. I'm here to get this right. We need a leader that is not of the broken system, someone who is not beholdened to the lobbyists but to the people who sent us here, someone who can unite our party and, most importantly, someone who can deliver on the promises that we have all made to the American people.
I believe that there are many people on the floor today that can do just that. I voted for my friend, Jim Jordan. I voted for my friend, Byron Donalds. I'm voting for Kevin Hern, the gentleman from Oklahoma. Mr. Hern went from rags to riches. Like myself and many other members, he is a small business owner. He's lived the American dream. He's a father, a family man. and, as Kevin likes to say, he's a conservative, but he's not mad about it. We can have a happy warrior leading us.
I understand that threats have been made about committee assignments, that you won't receive committee assignments if you do not vote for Kevin McCarthy. That is true. It happened in conference and that is exactly what we were told. But we don't govern in fear. We govern for the people, on principle. Son't be afraid to do the right thing. I believe that Kevin Hern is a unifier. He just received the Chairman of the Republican Study Committee by unanimous consent. This is the largest caucus in our conference. Look how many people have already put their trust in Kevin Hern to lead them. I get asked by my constituents: Where does this go? Who can unify the unify the party? Who can deliver results?
Representative Kevin Hern can do just that, and I am proud to enter his name into the nomination. And I hope that some of you join me.
Thank you and I yield back.
I am allergic to “both-sidism” in the extreme. But it seems to me that she has her counterparts on the Left:
Anton Jäger: The American experiment has just begun: As Baudrillard warned, US politics is coming for Europe: ‘Putin’s war… a full-blown “return of the king”… European industry and security policy [now] subordinate to American geopolitical imperatives… EU… effectively run from Langley….
Energy costs are destabilising the German export model. Dollar supremacy is stronger than ever. The biggest army in human history is now trying to reshore its industry. Liquid gas supplies find their way to Stuttgart….
Late imperial Rome with a stock exchange and nuclear weapons, and the same spectacle of public acclamations that accompanied the crepuscules of the pagan world… a vertiginously unbalanced form of hegemony….
The politics of other developed nations are also Americanising, with… regular BLM rallies and trans controversies a recurrent feature…. The hollow universality of American culture induces both despair and comfort…. From Silicon Valley to evangelicalism to Trump to polyamory to the military-industrial complex….
Anti-Americanism might be a moral imperative for Europeans. It certainly is satisfying. But a disinterest in the US is hard to justify politically, let alone strategically expedient…
Again: WTF?!?!
This, for example: the “American geopolitical imperatives” to which “European industry and security policy [is now] subordinate” is that a cruel and authoritarian Muscovite régime not conquer and once again dominate Eastern Europe. This is an American goal, yes. But Europeans who do not share it are either deranged or puppets of today’s kleptocratic Kremlin.
I suppose that, perhaps this is the rhetorical mood of the "politics of enemies" of Karl Schmidt: a bag of words, attempting to push affective buttons, without any theory of change, analysis of the situation, grounded in reality, or plan for constructive action.
ONE IMAGE: The Schumpeterian Shifts since 1969: From Industry to ???:
165 to 70 “Industrials”; 70 to 33 “Consumer Staples”; 20 to 0 “Diversified Mining and Metals”; 30 to 67 “Financials”; 19 to 62 “Health Care”; 18 to 68 “Infotech”; 5 to 32 “Real Estate”:
<https://www.qad.com/blog/2019/10/sp-500-companies-over-time>
ONE AUDIO: Understanding U.S. Inflation:
Can we explain what happened to inflation in the US in 2022, and what will happen next? Larry Ball and Daniel Leigh tell Tim Phillips why it stayed high and when it may fall:
<https://overcast.fm/+OIASYKII4>
Very Briefly Noted:
Open AI: Stable Diffusion Prompt Book… Figuring out how to quickly use these two is an interesting skill…
Elaine Moore: Whatever happened to Google Search?: Once a wonder of the online world, it is hard to escape the adverts now… “Hard”? Nearly impossible. It is just not useful to me anymore…
Dave Karpf: What comes after the tech crash?: ‘Generative AI seem[s] so magical is that it is a black box that even Google can’t open up… particularly troublesome if the company ends up deploying these new systems as a cost-cutting measure in the midst of a tech crash. Generative AI… will… create new problems. And we should worry that Google will cut the staff charged with looking inside the black boxes… And, yes, with high probability Google is about to get a bunch worst…
Wikipedia: Hodrick–Prescott filter: ‘Drawbacks…. The Hodrick–Prescott filter will only be optimal when data exists in a I(2) trend. If one-time permanent shocks or split growth rates occur, the filter will generate shifts in the trend that do not actually exist. Noise in data is approximately normally distributed. Analysis is purely historical and static (closed domain). The filter causes misleading predictions when used dynamically… Mushing away the signal and adding a huge amount of bizarre serial correlation, annoys that the model estimation, then recovers, never seemed to me to be a good way to go through life. I never understood its attraction for those of us, interested in understanding the world…
Tina Nguyen: McCarthy’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold: ‘What the so-called Taliban Twenty really want. Hint: it largely starts and ends with McCarthy rapturing out of the Speaker’s office. From conversations with allies of the 19 initial “no” votes, their opposition to Kevin McCarthy is about more than just wrangling concessions… So is this all really Scalise’s doing underneath?…
Matt Yglesias: ‘Solar output in 2021 exceeded the IPCC’s most optimistic forecast for 2030. DC is set to close the year with murders and carjackings both down about ten percent. After declining during the worst of the pandemic, the American population is growing again. There are large positive health effects of closing coal-fired power plants, even if the replacement is natural gas… Things not getting worse, or things, not getting worse as fast as they were—that is not things being good…
Substack: Product Lab: ‘Substack only makes money when you do—we only test features we think will grow your list and revenue, and we monitor results and feedback closely for unanticipated effects… A very interesting menagerie of different stuff that they are trying to do…
K&L Wine Merchant: 2005 Pavillon Rouge, Margaux: “The 2005 Pavillon Rouge is in a beautiful spot… just beginning to show signs of aromatic complexity and nuance. At fifteen years of age, the DNA of the vintage remains—Pavillon Rouge is a potent, hulking wine…. I imagine the 2005 will drink beautifully for another decade or more. Today it is positively stellar. The more it opens in the glass, the more classic it becomes… seriously: let it breathe for six hours…
¶s:
I want to boil this down to one question: does it do the most possible to build effective communities of engineering practice?:
Laura Tyson & Lenny Mendonca: America’s New Era of Industrial Policy: ‘Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act ($550 billion), the CHIPS and Science Act ($280 billion), and the Inflation Reduction Act ($394 billion)… are not traditional spending measures…. They are supply-side investments to boost US economic capacity, both overall and in key sectors such as semiconductors and renewable energy…. All three programs are based on the public-private model… designed to crowd-in and accelerate private investment…. All three bills include place-based programs designed to promote inclusive growth…. Getting an industrial policy right is never easy, and getting a place-based one right will prove even more challenging…
No, this is a “course” I really would like to take this spring:
Elle Griffin: Let's study all the utopian novels this year: ‘And how modern thinkers are taking utopian ideals into the future. If I were creating my dream curriculum, which of these classes would I actually want to take? I wrote them all down.... I read through that list in order. That’s why I finally read Les Miserables, The Count of Monte Cristo, Madame Bovary, Candide, Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, Manon Lescaut, The Nun, Dracula, The Picture of Dorian Gray, as well as a compendium of instructional literature about them. I learned so much reading “the classics” and they ultimately inspired my gothic novel and my decision to serialize it via this newsletter. Now I’m craving something similar.... Here is my personal curriculum for the year. It’s a... thorough mapping of utopian thought.... I’m calling it the Utopian Collective…
The best and most pellucid encapsulation of what's going on in bubbles that I have seen:
The Last Bear Standing: The Inside Game: Insiders, Outsiders, and the Great Pandemic Bubble: ‘In a bubble, there are two games being played.... The outside game is the sermon of the true believer.... Disruption. Innovation. A new paradigm. Everything is changing.... The cardinal rule is simple: Never sell. Diamond Hands. HODL. The inside game is a bit more complicated. The inside game recognizes and exploits a zero-sum game of social contagion.... What matters is how much hype you can generate and how many new outsiders you can lure.... The inside game is almost singularly focused on timing. And unlike the outside game, where selling is the cardinal sin, the entire goal of the inside game is to sell.... The outside player feels rich because of the mark-to-market (MTM) value of their assets—the implied value of their portfolio, if they were to sell. The insider gets rich by selling. Ironically, MTM wealth is merely the outside player transitively and superficially experiencing the true profits of the insider...
Yes: there is finally an unambiguous, horrible, and disgraceful example of non-right wing cancel culture out there:
Ken White: Hamline University & Cancel Culture: What Useful "Cancel Culture" Dialogue Could Involve: ‘Hamline Officially Punishing the Lecturer Is “Cancel Culture”…. Hamline’s Communications About The Incident Are “Cancel Culture”…. Hamline’s Student Newspaper Engaged In “Cancel Culture”…. Hamline’s Students Engaged In “Cancel Culture”…. There were ways for students to respond to this lecture that would not be “cancel culture” and I would not think deserve condemnation…. They engage with the issues and offer the speaker’s views on them. They just don’t treat the first speaker as sacrosanct. Demanding that the lecturer be fired, not renewed, or disciplined is wildly disproportionate, in my view, and it’s fair to call it “cancel culture.” Demanding that a non-sectarian university discipline teachers if they violate religious sectarian taboos and norms — whether it’s not depicting a subject-relevant image of Muhammad, not spelling out the full name of G-d, or not studying blasphemous discussions or depictions of Mary — is extremely disproportionate and censorial…. If you want to impose religious sectarianism on people, go to a sectarian school, or be thought of as a censor. The Hamline students seem completely unashamed of this wildly inappropriate stance…. What About Speech Decency?… I think the criticism of the lecturer is indecent, actually. The lecturer showed sensitivity, gave a content warning, explained the pedagogical context, and then taught famous, historically and artistically significant art in a f***ing art class. The people piling on him — the entitled students, the let’s-not-call-them-student-journalists, and the woefully philosophically unsuited administrators were indecent about it. Tucker Carlson couldn’t have invented a better set of facts to push a college-students-are-fascists, colleges-are-ineffectual-and-censorial, Sharia-law-is-coming culture war study…. This is a huge culture war victory for the anti-progressive Right. A lot of dumping on colleges and college students is culture war nonsense. But sometimes people deserve to be dumped on, because they’ve done contemptible things...
Do note, as Noah does, that Ehrlich is right on wildlife loss, and how we should be trying to prevent it.
But the sheer idiocy of Ehrlich in the past, and the disgraceful unwillingness to wrestle with his past errors is truly contemptible:
Noah Smith: Biologist Paul Ehrlich is one of the most discredited popular intellectuals in America. He’s so discredited that his Wikipedia page starts the second paragraph with “Ehrlich became well known for the discredited 1968 book The Population Bomb”. In that book he predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the decade to come; when no such thing happened (in the 70s or ever so far), Ehrlich’s name became sort of a household joke among the news-reading set. And yet despite all this, in the year 2022, 60 Minutes still had Ehrlich on to offer his thoughts on wildlife loss…. It’s useful to review why Ehrlich got things so wrong, and why the people who make similar claims today—i.e., the “degrowth” movement—are also wrong. But it’s also important to realize that just because Ehrlich was wrong about overpopulation and some other stuff doesn’t mean that he, or the degrowth people, are wrong about the threat of habitat destruction and wildlife loss…. The scientific “models” that Ehrlich… relied on were… just drawing exponential curves and then saying “See, line go up!”… A bunch of new agricultural technologies…. Population growth has… slowed… thanks to lower fertility rates…
I'm surprised Bobert was elected speaker by acclamation after that stirring passion.