BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-06-14 We

Þere is always anti-Clinton bullshit; Twitter's clown car; Nelson on Apple Vision Pro; & I suspect þe original name "Fort Bragg" was a joke, Troughton-Smith on the Apple ecosystem as the Vision...

Jun 14, 2023

MUST-READ: Why Is þe Public Sphere so Filled wiþ Mendacious Anti-Clinton Bullshit?:

An awful lot of people who should know better are parroting lots of false anti-Clinton bullshit that has polluted their minds over the past thirty years. They should know better. As someone who was very public in the early 2000s that the Democratic Party had much better potential presidents available than HRC, I have some credibility on this. I want to spend it by reminding you that Scott Lemieux is right here:

Scott Lemieux: The Clinton Rules never die: ‘The National Review, to its credit. has tried to explain to its readers why the indictment of Trump is sound and serious. But even so they can’t resist reminding us of the standards of “evidence” that have long been used against the Clintons…. Since it’s not just Republicans who are confused on this point, it’s worth recapitulating:
(1) There was nothing illegal (as opposed to contrary to State Department guidelines) about Clinton using a private email account or private server.
(2) The fact that it was theoretically possible to use a private server to conceal or destroy classified documents does not, in fact, constitute evidence in itself that the server was used in that way.
(3) Clinton’s story — that she used a private email, like Colin Powell did, because she didn’t want to carry two phones — is backed up by more evidence than any of the lock-her-up conspiracy theories.
(4) Despite constant implications that the private server presented a security risk, it was one of the few Clinton-related servers whose integrity was not breached during the 2016 campaign.
To state the obvious, Trump didn’t fail to prosecute Clinton out of some kind of bipartisan comity. He didn’t prosecute her because there’s no evidence she did anything illegal, a point that her critics often concede within their conspiracy theories.

ONE IMAGE: Twitter’s Clown Car Continues as a Source of Amusement:

Twitter itself, and Elon Musks fans as well:

Share Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality

ONE VIDEO: Quinn Nelson on Apple Vision Pro:

Very Briefly Noted:

: Brainard: ‘House Republican Tax Bills… are now focusing on cutting taxes for large corporations and setting the stage for even larger tax cuts skewed to corporations and the wealthy…. Ways and Means Committee mark-up…. House Republicans… expensive business tax cuts… would add more than $500 billion to deficits…. groundwork for… extending all the expiring provisions from… Trump… which would add over $2.5 trillion more...
Paul Krugman: How hard do we really have to push on inflation?: ‘Inflation has come down substantially. Gas prices are way down from their peak of $5 a gallon…. Grocery prices… are currently falling…. Why is 2 percent the target anyway? The history of 2 percent is actually quite strange, and there’s a pretty good case for a higher target…
Lee Harris: Is Capitalism Really Cracking Up Nation-States?: ‘Quinn Slobodian’s new book shimmers with libertarian dreams but fails to demonstrate that zones are splintering national governments…
Francisco J. Buera & al.: From Micro to Macro Development: ‘Randomized controlled trials need representative data and structural modeling, and macro models need to be designed and disciplined to the realities and data of developing-country economies…. Resource constraints, heterogeneity, general equilibrium effects, obstacles to trade, dynamics, and returns to scale can all play key roles...
Jeffrey Blehar: Trump’s Indictment Is Worse Than You Think It Is: ‘Come and see why the former president is nailed dead to rights… boxes of documents stored in a storage room at Trump's Mar-a-Lago club in Florida in 2021…
Robby Soave: Trump's Own Attorney General Says Indictment Is 'Very, Very Damning': ‘Virtually all Republican senators and members of the House are defending… Trump…. But Trump's own attorney general, Bill Barr, thinks the indictment is "very, very damning"… shocked "by the degree of sensitivity of these documents, and how many there were, frankly." He said that federal authorities had every right to recover the documents…
Liberty: The Apple Headset: ‘Apple seems to have shown that the best way to… AR is… to simulate it in… VR…. This is the seed of a Star Trek Holodeck model of XR. Pricing at $3500 can seem expensive at first, but I think it makes sense in context…
Dan Hon: ‘Platforms that hit too much enshittification or where leadership…stupid… end up… unbundled…. Twitter… across… Slack/Discord/Twitch/etc. Reddit was already kind of unbundling with… Discords, this recent spate of short-sighted ham-fisted shitty leadership will only push more…
Jim Savage: ‘What subfield of X should exist but barely does?’ Gabriel Mathy: ‘Macroeconomic development (separate from growth theory)’ Steve Hou: ‘So like growth theory but actually theories on how countries actually can grow rather than pure speculation that has nothing to do with anything that’s the current growth theory?’ DeLong: ‘That was “growth theory” once… before the Dark Times… before all the RBC people showed up…
David Gerard: Crypto Collapse? Get in, loser, we’re pivoting to AI: ‘It’s not clear if the VCs actually buy their own pitch for ChatGPT’s spicy autocomplete as the harbinger of the robot apocalypse. Though if you replaced VC Twitter with ChatGPT, you would see a significant increase in quality…

Give a gift subscription

¶s:

Forms of authoritarian rulership always have higher institutional priorities than rapid, economic growth, or general prosperity. No matter what is commended from on high, rapid growth is unlikely. And so, henceforward, rapid economic growth is very unlikely to happen in China. Only a single minded focus on economic growth as the key link plus the legacy of Deng Xiaoping’s highlighting the dangers of Maoist personality cults kept China on track from 1976 to 2008. Now it looks to me to be off track big time: Phil Cunningham: Essay: The Chairman: ‘The end of hiding your light and biding your time…. Xi put in the work…. The Chairman of nearly everything…. His full title is General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee, State President, and Chairman of the Central Military Commission (中共中央总书记、国家主席、中央军委主席). It’s a real mouthful of marbles that Xinwen Lianbo news anchors not only get precisely right every time, but somehow manage to say with smiles and bright-eyed enthusiasm. The Chinese for “State President” is literally translated as “country chairman” (国家主席), and he has not yet been called “Party Chairman” (党主席), like Mao. In CCTV vox populi, Xi is most often referred to simply as “General Secretary” (总书记). Nonetheless, Chinese state media and Party propaganda make it perfectly clear. Xi is the capo dei capi, the biggest boss, and the Chairman of Everything, in the memorable phrase coined by Sinologist Geremie Barmé. And anyone who gets their news from the Chinese media and internet knows that there is only one man who really matters in Beijing right now. Xi Jinping’s portrait doesn’t hang from Tiananmen Gate yet, and there’s no saying that it will, but the way things are going, the possibility cannot be thoroughly discounted…
The kinds of businessman whom the enthusiasm for crypto on the part of venture capitalists, who really did no better rewarded. And throughout their entire career, these guys produced zero of social utility: Matt Levine: What are the 3AC guys up to?: ‘Wrong answers: Short crypto. You’d have gotten carried out, multiple times. Long crypto… better… but still risky (the bubble did pop) and sort of analytically unsatisfying…. A pretty good answer: Take out absolutely bajillions of dollars of non-recourse loans to buy as much crypto as you can, selling enough along the way and putting the proceeds somewhere your creditors can’t get them—to make yourself dynastically wealthy. Borrow $1 billion to buy $1 billion worth of crypto. If that turns into $2 billion of crypto, pay off your loans, take the extra $1 billion and bury it in your backyard, and do it again. If you do it again and it turns into $0 of crypto, walk away from your debts, dig up your backyard and buy yachts…. Kyle Davies and Su Zhu, the founders of Three Arrows Capital. Three Arrows, or 3AC as everyone calls it, is usually called a “crypto hedge fund,” but that name is not really accurate. Typically a hedge fund raises money from investors, invests it, gives the profits to investors and takes a cut. But 3AC does not seem to have invested much money for outside investors. Instead 3AC invested using its partners’ capital and immense oceans of leverage from crypto lending platforms. This leverage was provided with very little in the way of due diligence or negotiation or often even collateral…
Apple is betting a lot on its Vision Pro being a much better screen than can be provided in a Macintosh or an iPad form factor. And right now absolutely nobody knows the extent to which that will be true for particular use cases, or in general. Do note that the viability of the product depends on three things: Sony's screen, manufacturers, Apple’s chip designers, and TSMC’s fabs. I see no way for anybody else to compete, not for a decade: Steve Troughton-Smith: ‘Apple… killer app for Vision Pro… showing developers just how easy it is to transition from iOS to visionOS…. Microsoft had a term for this: the 'app gap’. No matter how much money they threw at developers to port their apps to Windows Phone (and related platforms), it never even made a dent. The iOS ecosystem has all the developer mindshare. Incredible third-party apps, enabled by powerful first-party frameworks, has been Apple's secret sauce for decades…’. Jerry Gonzalez: ‘The Vision Pro just works, and blends nicely into the Apple ecosystem. As an Apple user, you know what to expect out of notes, FaceTime, Safari. You’re familiar with the way Apple UI translates across all their hardware Their killer app is, “you don’t have to change your habits. Just get going, as it blends into your current flow”…
Given Braxton Bragg's performance as a Confederate general in Tennessee and Georgia, I have always more than half suspected that the original name “Fort Bragg"“was a Yankee joke: some northern artillery officer who knew a little Civil War history responding to "is there a guy from North Carolina we could name this after?” with snark, which the other people in the room missed: Paul Campos: Renaming Fort Bragg: A major issue facing America in 2023: ‘On the day Donald Trump got indicted for committing dozens of high level felonies, this is what Ron DeSantis was talking about… “said if he’s elected president he would reverse the recent decision to change the name of Fort Bragg to Fort Liberty…. ‘It’s an iconic name and an iconic base, and we’re not going to let political correctness run amok in North Carolina’”…. The weird thing about this particular outburst… is that Braxton Bragg, besides being a traitor in the defense of slavery, was also a really terrible general… “considered among the worst generals of the Civil War. Most of the battles he engaged in ended in defeat. Bragg was extremely unpopular with both the officers and ordinary men under his command…. The losses suffered by Bragg’s forces are cited as highly consequential to the ultimate defeat of the Confederacy.” That a major US military base was ever named after this traitorous loser in the first place is a tribute to the perverse influence of the Dunning-Kruger school of revisionist Civil War history…