BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-06-17 Sa
Þe Hemingses of Monticello; Kara Swisher wants her Apple Vision Pro; þe Biden manufacturing boom; & Shakezula on þe hell our political press will put us through over the next two years, Gans &...
…Nagaraj on Apple Vision Pro, Jonah Goldberg gets it wrong on what CRT is, & O’Sullivan on a16z trying to move its crypto grift operation to London…
MUST-READ: The Hemingses of Monticello:
Mary Hemings Bell, born in 1753, was the oldest half-sister of Sally Hemings. Yet Thomas Jefferson would not let her take he 11 and 9 year old children Joseph and Betsy with her when he hired her out as a slave to her future husband Thomas Bell. Interesting man, Jefferson:
Monticello: Mary Hemings Bell: ‘In the 1780s… Thomas Bell leased Mary Hemings Bell as a domestic servant from Jefferson. She went with her two youngest children, Joseph and Betsy—Jefferson had already given her two eldest, Daniel and Molly, to his sister and daughter. Mary Hemings Bell became Thomas Bell's common-law wife…. Thomas Bell unofficially freed her, acknowledged their two children, and bequeathed his estate to them. Jefferson refused to sell Mary Hemings Bell's older children, Joseph Fossett and Betsy Hemmings…. Mary Hemings Bell maintained close ties with her still enslaved children, who were only eleven and nine years old when separated from their mother….
During the crisis of 1827, when members of her family were sold at the Monticello dispersal sale, Mary Bell's economic standing enabled her son Joseph Fossett to arrange for the purchase of a number of his own children. Mary Hemings Bell and her descendants were an integral part of the Charlottesville community throughout the years. Thomas and Mary Bell's free daughter, Sally Jefferson Bell, married Jesse Scott, an accomplished musician. Scott and his sons played for dances and entertainments all over Virginia. Mary Hemings Bell and her descendants occupied a house on Charlottesville's Main Street for a century…
ONE IMAGE: Manufacturing Structures Investment:
No, we have not seen anything like this boom before:
ONE AUDIO: Kara Swisher Is Ready to Ditch Her Laptop for an Apple Vision Pro:
Very Briefly Noted:
Brink Lindsey: Avoiding Scylla and Charybdis: ‘The government’s capacity to manipulate and coerce…. The temptation to exercise that capacity…. A successful economic independence movement could help to defuse… threats…. Remember the… widespread belief that widely distributed computing power was inherently anti-authoritarian…
Paul Krugman: Core inflation had its day. It’s time to move on: ‘Traditional core inflation is strongly affected by the price of shelter…. My preferred measure these days is “super core,” which excludes both used car prices and shelter…
Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal: It’s the Return of Extend and Pretend: ‘Amend and extend… for now, it’s helping to take the edge off some of the biggest concerns around commercial credit…
Matt Levine: Regional Banks Don’t Feel Loved: ‘If your bank is sitting you down and making you sign a nondisclosure agreement to tell you details of its operations to keep your deposits, something has gone very wrong…. This is the basic problem of regional banks. Bank depositors didn’t sign up to be bank equity analysts…
Athanasios Geromichalos, Lucas Herrenbrueck, and Sukjoon Lee: Asset Safety versus Asset Liquidity: ‘Mixing them up can lead to confusion…. The common belief that “safety implies liquidity” is generally justified but also identify conditions under which this relationship can be reversed...
Martin Wolf: Developing countries have hit the financial rocks: ‘The dire situation on debt has become pressing—urgent action is needed…
W.H. Auden (1937): Spain: We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and/History to the defeated/May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon…
Alex Shephard: It Turns Out Being Indicted is Not Good for Donald Trump: ‘A growing number of Independents—and Republicans—are concerned by the former president's handling of classified information…
Timothy Burke: The Read: Tamsyn Muir, “Harrow the Ninth”: ‘Strange and enticing… whiffs of The Chronicles of Riddick, Gormenghast, Warhammer 40K, The Fall of the House of Usher, Frankenstein, and Rebecca, but it also stands as a real original…
Brad DeLong (2005): A Better Class of Critics of Jared Diamond, Please...: ‘
¶s:
I have long been an enthusiast for Web3, and a very harsh critic of the crypto grifters. When did a16z shift from the first to the second? It certainly did. And certainly one’s vision of the venture capitalists at a16z has to have been profoundly changed as a result of their expeditions into crypto. Yes, they got a lot richer as a result of their ventures. But they did so by not being long-term greedy. They did so by treating their counterparties—those who hired their expertise in trusting them with their money, and those who accepted their representations by committing to the funding rounds that allowed a16z to withdraw its funds from crypto startups with astronomical profits—as their marks and their cattle, rather than as their long-term partners: Sinead O’Sullivan: A16z in the UK: a marriage of cryptovenience?: ‘Old world, new tricks…. There’s nothing worse than having $7bn in your back pocket and not being able to spend it. Just ask Chris Dixon, Sriram Krishnan and the 104 other people on Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto team…. But here’s the thing: more than half of this money, $4.5 billion, was announced after the crypto industry started to freeze over…. A16z has three clear options, in rough order or desirability : 1) diversify out of the United States, 2) diversify out of crypto, or 3) return the fund to its investors. Assuming the fund’s partners would rather die than forego $140mn in fees revenue a year, let’s look at the firm’s only two real options: opportunistic geographic expansion or saying “we’re investing in AI but we’re pretending it’s crypto”…. A16z needed to scrape the barrel… one of the few remaining non-regulated crypto geographies…
Singapore-upon-Thamesthe United Kingdom…. The UK has managed to get rid of its own pesky regulatory overlords… and pick[ed] a wannabe crypto bro, Rishi Sunak, as prime minister…No. That is not it. Critical Race Theory, as I understand it, has two components: (1) Don’t make Black people poor, discriminate against the poor, and claim that you are not discriminating against Black people; (2) Our society is still so saturated with bigotry, so we need to try a lot harder—and, especially, dismantle and replace institutions that have failed us. Critical race theorists know much better than Jonah Goldberg that it is people who are Black and poor who suffer most from crimes, violent and non-violent, committed by people who slip through the net of a police force more interested in maintaining racial hierarchy: Jonah Goldberg: Critical Trump Theory: ‘What is the core argument of “structural” or “systemic” or “institutional” racism?… It’s that our society is so saturated with bigotry that it is impossible for black people to get justice so it’s better we not even try…. Better we “defund the police” than risk compounding racial injustice. Progressive prosecutors would rather turn a blind eye to crimes than put another black man in jail, regardless of how guilty he is. The system is irredeemable…
Kara Swisher believes that the Apple Vision Pro will be much better than a laptop: much bigger screens in her mind’s eye (or her eyes’ mind), lighter and easier to carry. Thus it will enhance her ability to live her life when she is in hotel rooms and on airplanes. But I think she is an anomalous use case. What are the typical use cases? Gans and Nagaraj propose a framework: Joshua Gans and Abhishek Nagaraj: What Is Apple’s Vision Pro Really For?: ‘A better and more convenient display for 2D content, however, does not appear to justify the technological and R&D weight that has gone into the Vision Pro. The real question is whether this device can lead to the augmented and virtual reality applications that would justify strapping a computer to your head…. The best use cases will be in contexts where it is normally expensive or dangerous to get information, highlighting the value of VR, or where the environment is so complex that the value of digital overlays to clarify it via AR is high…
I cannot tell you how much I wish this were overstated snark, rather than an accurate description of reality: Shakezula: If you want a picture of the future of campaign reporting, imagine a hand typing ‘Democratic Candidate Callously Refuses to Appease Republicans,’ forever: ‘I’m looking forward to 900 months of pundits and political reporters claiming that the GOP’s ardent embrace of a disgusting, dim-witted crook is a problem for the Democratic candidate. A reporter for FiveThirtyEight demonstrates the easiest approach. Simply use extremely broad terms like “voters” and “people” instead of accurate terms like “Republican voters” and “Republicans,” as much as possible…
Re critical race theory. I always thought it was an attempt to explain the poor economic/social/health etc.
The Right's answer is they are inferior and got what they deserve.
Too often the other answer is some mixture of undeserving poor and bad culture.
The facts seem to be pervasive systemic racism.
The current anti-CRT movement seems to paraphrase the Wilde man, the hate that dare not speak it's name.
re: Construction of Manufacturing Facilities.
Compare and contrast the 2017 Tax Cuts & Jobs Act with the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. What did they cost, who did they help, and how much did they increase trend employment and investment?
Democrats need to build a narrative and hammer it relentlessly. They need bullet points.
They also need to change the narrative on the China trade war: Trump's tariffs weren't nearly as effective as Biden's global coalition of supply chain diversification away from China.