BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-11-05 Su
Gary Marcus on the difference between remote-assist driving & self-driving; the California office in November'; the attention-info-biotech mode of production; overpraising Hua Guofeng; Bob Reich on...
Gary Marcus on the difference between remote-assist driving & self-driving; the California office in November; the attention-info-biotech mode of production; overpraising Hua Guofeng; Bob Reich on the Neofascist International; EVs & mass-market adoption; Treasury bond term premia; Zeke Faux’s very good Number Go Up; very briefly noted; & what a soft landing looks like, not technofeudalism, & briefly noted for 2023-11-03 Th…
ONE AUDIO: Zeke Faux: Number Go Up:
Tether was so obviously a scam, and yet it now looks to have become a very profitable company. But Zeke Faux found plenty of other scammy things that did not:
<https://overcast.fm/+s3EtTqtKI>
ONE IMAGE: Estimated 10-Yr US Treasury Bond Term Premia:
Very Briefly Noted:
Economics: Suresh Naidu: Is There Any Future for a US Labor Movement?: ‘US union density remains low, even as unions remain popular… because [of] employer opposition and US labor law together…. These barriers make dense social networks and high levels of social capital at work a prerequisite for unionization. Labor organizing can build this social capital, but faces an uphill battle…
Toby Nangle: Why there are still active asset managers: ‘Markets are efficient, but not perfectly so. They appear too efficient to bear the weight of mutual fund fees, but insufficiently so to justify large investors’ use of active managers. The scale of value-add is small, but highly statistically significant…. When working for large institutional investors, active managers have defied Sharpe’s proof… '
David Kelly: Cooldown Ahead of Schedule: ‘Stronger-than-expected economic growth is, of course, generally positive…provided it is accompanied by a general easing in inflation pressures. Data due out this week should provide further evidence that it is…. If [the Fed] wanted to send a dovish signal…they could note that core inflation has continued to ease and that financial conditions have tightened due to both a further 50 basis point backup in 10-year Treasury yields and a 7% slide in the S&P500…. However, in 2023, the Fed is in no mood to send dovish signals…
Kevin Williams: Cute, fun to ride, but does it have a future? The Honda Motocompacto: ‘Even Honda isn’t sure what to do with this cute little thing…. It's not clear what will happen next… after all, it was a secret project done by one engineer at its Ohio R&D facility…
Cognition: Jonathan Corbin: ‘The encoding specificity principle…. The knowledge, values, and beliefs we retrieve when making a judgement depend on the retrieval cues present in the question. Furthermore, monitoring judgments for consistency is cognitively taxing (we have limited working memory.) This is how you get things like framing effects…
Central Country: Hunter L. Clark & Matthew Higgins: Can China Catch Up with Greece?: Xi Jinping recently laid out the goal of reaching the per capita income of “a mid-level developed country by 2035.” Is this goal likely to be achieved? Not in our view…. Population aging… diminishing returns to… investment-centered growth… a turn toward increased state management… the crystallization of legacy credit issues in real estate… limits on access to key foreign technologies…. China appears likely to close only a fraction of the gap with high-income countries in the years ahead…
CryptoGrifts: Max Read: "Techno-optimism" is a sign of V.C. crisis: ‘It's not funny, V.C.s only do this when they’re in extreme distress…. What Andreessen has been doing in lieu of building, and besides signing off on bad cryptocurrency investments, is spending a lot of time on Twitter…
GPT-LLM-ML: David Guarino: ‘Super interesting new Arxiv article on applying a "branch-solve-merge" logic to usage of LLMs. These are the kinds of problem decomposition strategies that I think will increasingly get these magic boxes solving hard human problems consistently…
Ryan Smith: Apple Announces M3 SoC Family: M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max Make Their Marks: ‘We’ve undoubtedly seen these CPU cores before…. The A17 is the more likely candidate… [TSMC] already has working… N3B…. M3 family efficiency cores are… a full 50% faster than the M1’s…. As for why Apple isn’t bulking up the M3 Pro… the M3 Pro should be meaningfully cheaper to produce than the M2 Pro, thanks to a combination of lower transistor count and smaller die size…
Alex Ker: ‘Many startups just died today. Because OpenAI added PDF chat. You can also chat with data files and other document types. We had a wave of products better suited as features rather than stand-alone companies. Wrappers are being squeezed by OpenAI on one side and incumbents on the other. It's a rough world out there…
SubStack NOTES:
Economics & GPT-LLM-ML: This seems highly likely to be correct to me. I do, however, wonder whether remote-assist might ultimately make some money—the overwhelming bulk of the time the car drives itself; in tricky situations the remote operator takes over; with a loud blaring alarm telling you to takeover and grab the wheel when your connection becomes unstable. I could see myself paying a bunch of money to have to drive only five minutes per hour in the car—and have a better driver than me at the wheel in potentially sticky situations:
The 21st Century: The California office, early November:
Economics: The attention-info-biotech economic mode of production is gonna be LIT!
I mean, things got weird and real with the imperial-commercial society mode of production. And that was followed by steampower, applied-science, mass-production, and global value-chain modes. But things are about to get weirder and realer:
Central Country: Wait! What?! Borrowing money and buying foreign capital goods is not comprehensive economic reform. Yes Hua believed—along with nearly everyone else in the Chinese leadership—that something needed to be done. Yes, Deng himself was not a fount of ideas or a terribly good judge of what was likely to work. But Deng was willing to give people the baton, and let ten if not a hundred flowers bloom in pursuing the Four Modernizations, decollectivizing agriculture, and nurturing an entrepreneurial business class—first borrowed from Hong Kong and Taiwan—closely allied with local party bosses. Before purging those who had gone too far. Hu Yaobang, Zhao Ziyang, Xi Zhongxun, Zhu Rongji and the rest were Deng’s guys. It is hard to see them having been given the batons and so much running room had Hua Guofeng continued to be paramount:
Neofascism: Bob Reich is thinking about the current state of the Neofascist International--which he says is composed of Putin, Trump, Netanyahu, and Johnson: all of them "I will keep you safe from THEM, somehow" grifters. Do Nahendra Modi and Xi Jinping belong on the list as well? And certainly Boris Johnson belongs! But are they best seen as all Neofascists, or as all actual or wannabe "spin dictators", a la Sergei Guriev and Dan Triesman's "Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century", trying to assemble blocs of supporters focusing on oligarchs motivated by money and a broader mass base of the fearful? The three tentpole propositions of all of them are that (a) many (most?) do not deserve to vote and be counted, (b) the Leader is to be trusted because he thinks deeper and is playing eleven-dimensional chess, and (c) the enemies of the true people deserve to suffer violence. But is that enough commonality to make a global movement?
Global Warming: Is Andrew Hawkins's anecdotal dichotomy between Apple Watch-wearing early-adopter EV enthusiasts and normal people accurate? I remember when we bought our first Prius. It seemed neutral to us as a value proposition—that depended on what happened to gas prices—but it also seemed cool, and we then had grave doubts about Tesla build quality and the speed of build-out of the charger network. For apartment dwellers, rural residents, and the upfront-cost constrained—which is 2/3 of America, albeit only 1/3 of American spending money—EVs are not a live option. But for the rest of us? Gasoline price uncertainty, in my estimation, is still out there, and still makes IC-or-EV neutral as a value proposition. So my suspicion is that social network effects will dominate. Which means there is a case for a short-term targeted EV-purchase subsidy program in urban and suburban areas where they are relatively scarce, in order to create the social network connections needed to remove nformation gaps regarding the total cost of ownership, the longevity and performance of EV batteries, and the environmental benefits:
Central Country: I think we ought to be more contingent with China estimates. China could turn away from State management. It has enormous possibilities of developing technologies. Aging populations may not be as much less innovative as some think.
Kelly. Observations of inflation and unemployment employment data points that look like a "Phillips Curve" are Fed mistakes. It appears the Fed is willing to risk adding a data point or more to such a curve.