SubStack iOS App Turns Out to Be, for Me, a Remarkably Useful Short Podcast Player & Generator, &
SubStack iOS App Turns Out to Be, for Me, a Remarkably Useful Short Podcast Player & Generator, &
BRIEFLY NOTED: 2022-03-09 We
CONDITION: We Truly Did Not Have History Rhyming to the Spanish Civil War on Our 2022 Bingo Card!:
First: ‘Stack App for iOS:
You can now read Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality in the new ‘Stack app for iPhone—but not (YET) Android:
The ‘Stack Communications Apparat says:
With the app, you’ll have a dedicated Inbox for my ‘Stack and any others you subscribe to. New posts will never get lost in your email filters, or stuck in spam. Longer posts will never cut-off by your email app. Comments and rich media will all work seamlessly. Overall, it’s a big upgrade to the reading experience. If you do not have an “Apple device”, you can join the Android waitlist here.”
I have been a beta tester for the iPhone ‘Stack app.
The use case I have found for it may be unique, but it is something that it seems to be very very good at.
The use I have found for it is as a podcast player—and using Apple's text-to-speech feature for ‘Stacks that do not have attached audio podcasts. It has, so far, been a very very good experience.
I also have found it useful for keeping track of bite-sized things to read during short periods of what would otherwise be waiting time. It is very good at pulling up something interesting, so that I do not have to draw upon the resources of my rich inner life.
One Audio:
Michael Kofman & Ryan Evans: 11 Days in: Russia’s Invasion Stumbles Forward: ‘Russia bungled its invasion plan but is nonetheless making progress in the face of fierce Ukrainian resistance. But can the Russian military stay combat effective? What lessons can we learn from the war so far? What role is urban warfare playing in this fight? What do the troubles faced by the Russian military and security services in Ukraine portend for the regime of Vladimir Putin? And what exactly is going on with that long column of Russian forces north of Kyiv?…
<https://warontherocks.com/2022/03/11-days-in-russias-invasion-stumbles-forward/>
One Picture: Apple Computer: Jade, Jade-C-Chop, Jade-2C-Die: M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max, M1 Ultra
Very Briefly Noted:
Janan Ganesh: Why the Ukraine CrisisIis so Bad for Western Populists: ‘It is not the moral stain, but the blow to the idea that autocrats are competent… <https://www.ft.com/content/62b6bc6d-5c5d-400f-9305-999fa6bf4487>
Jerome Armstrong: Berkshire Has a Moment: ‘Shares in Berkshire Hathaway are having a really, really good 2022… <https://www.ft.com/content/c4b5f29e-545d-4f24-8025-0350de06c37c>
Andrey Kozyrev: Military Failing Because Budget Spent on Yachts: ‘The Kremlin spent the last 20 years trying to modernize its military. Much of that budget was stolen and spent on mega-yachts in Cyprus. But as a military advisor you cannot report that to the President. So they reported lies to him instead… <https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-ex-fm-kozyrev-miitary-failing-budget-spent-yachts-2022-3>
Rob Lee: ’"In less than a week, the United States and NATO have pushed more than 17,000 antitank weapons, including Javelin missiles, over the borders of Poland and Romania"…
Kamil Galeev: Why Russia Will Lose
Karen Attiah: ’The Atlantic’s April cover story is a case study in everything that is wrong with access journalism and the immoral fixation on powerful, brutal men, @KarenAttiah writes. https://t.co/pBda5mlpe8" / Twitter_: ‘The Atlantic’s April cover story is a case study in everything that is wrong with access journalism and the immoral fixation on powerful, brutal men…
The Byzantine Scotist: ’Donald Trump is not a historical figure but is actually a compilation of 4 distinct sources. A thread…. The oldest two sources are the paleocon (P) and libertarian (L) sources. A later neocon (N) source was then added to make the narrative more acceptable, and the final MAGA (M) redactor combined these distinct sources into a single narrative…
Eric Topol: ’The impact of Covid on the brain…
Paragraphs:
William H. Janeway: Capital Is Not a Strategy: ‘While entrepreneurs and venture-capital founders tell themselves that “capital is a strategy,” bubble finance is no substitute for a business plan that can achieve positive cash flow…. In the low-friction world of internet-delivered or mediated services, start-ups are eager to spend ever-greater amounts of other people’s money to acquire customers, the goal being to emerge victorious in a winner-takes-all race…. Occasionally, these explosions of investor exuberance have funded the deployment of innovative technologies at sufficient scale to transform the market economy, as was the case with railroads, electrification, and the internet. Whether a bubble is productive depends on what it leaves behind. But all bubbles burst, so even investors in the vehicles of a productive episode inevitably will fall into one of two categories: the quick or the dead…. The managerial sagas of Uber, WeWork, and Theranos represent the downstream consequences of the flood unleashed by central banks. Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes may be the only one so far to have been caught crossing the line into criminal liability as she pumped and puffed up her company. But the absence of other prosecutions is no excuse for investors and board members to abandon their fiduciary responsibilities…
Alan Cole: This GOP Senator Can’t Stop Talking About His Plan to Raise Taxes: ‘Sen. Rick Scott… 11-point “Rescue America” plan…. “All Americans should pay some income tax to have skin in the game, even if a small amount. Currently over half of Americans pay no income tax.”… Scott defended the idea in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last Thursday…. I don’t think Scott’s view is about economics…. Scott’s references to “skin in the game” suggest a kind of bank-shot strategy based on dubious right-wing pop-polisci. “The federal government has figured out how to disconnect many Americans from fiscal reality,” Scott wrote in his WSJ op-ed. “Politicians peddle a fiction that they can waste as much money as they want with no downside.” The cure? “Even if it is just a few bucks, everyone needs to know what it is like to pay some taxes.”… Scott’s idea assumes that even small income tax sums will create a strong emotional investment in fiscal responsibility… [and] that… payroll taxes, do not inculcate that same ethos…. More cynical political veterans may guffaw at my earnest attempt to analyze this idea seriously. They might note that the point is simply to be talked about, to build an email list, and to get the less sophisticated people excited. Then, when you get elected, you ignore the idea and do something else entirely. But I think this is a mistake…. If you’re a backbencher looking to raise your political profile, it makes sense to put out some wild vaporware proposals in order to draw attention to yourself. But if you are acting as a spokesperson for more of the party, or even just attempting to build a solid national profile, your ideas should not be liabilities…
LINK: <https://fullstackeconomics.com/this-gop-senator-cant-stop-talking-about-his-plan-to-raise-taxes/>
Adam Tooze: John Mearsheimer & the Dark Origins of Realism: ‘“Why is Ukraine the West’s fault?”… is the provocative title of a talk by Professor John Mearsheimer… international relations (IR) realism…. In 2022 Mearsheimer is still delivering his message, most explosively on 1 March in an ill-advised down-the-telephone interview to the New Yorker…. What is the realism that Mearsheimer claims to espouse?… The scandal entails Mearsheimer’s refusal to see Putin’s aggression as anything other than the behaviour of a great power at bay…. Great powers, the theory goes, guard their security through spheres of interest…. If necessary, those zones are defended with force, and anyone who fails to recognise and respect this fails to grasp the violent logic of international relations…. But that is not the same as actually explaining war, any more than gesturing to imperialism is an adequate explanation for why the Kaiser gave the Austrians a blank cheque in July 1914. The realist model is grossly underspecified and fails to grasp the qualitative shift implied by the opening of hostilities…. To resort to war, by any side, should be acknowledged for what it is. It should not be normalised as the logical and obvious reaction to given circumstances, but recognised as a radical and perilous act, fraught with moral consequences. Any thinker or politician too callous or shallow to face that stark reality, should be judged accordingly…
LINK: <https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2022/03/john-mearsheimer-and-the-dark-origins-of-realism>
Ed Yong: How Did This Many Deaths Become Normal?: ‘The United States reported more deaths from COVID–19 last Friday than deaths from Hurricane Katrina, more on any two recent weekdays than deaths during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, more last month than deaths from flu in a bad season, and more in two years than deaths from HIV during the four decades of the AIDS epidemic. At least 953,000 Americans have died from COVID, and the true toll is likely even higher because many deaths went uncounted. COVID is now the third leading cause of death in the U.S., after only heart disease and cancer, which are both catchall terms for many distinct diseases. The sheer scale of the tragedy strains the moral imagination. On May 24, 2020, as the United States passed 100,000 recorded deaths, The New York Times filled its front page with the names of the dead, describing their loss as “incalculable.” Now the nation hurtles toward a milestone of 1 million. What is 10 times incalculable?…
LINK: <https://kottke.org/22/03/how-did-this-many-deaths-become-normal>
Napier Lopez: Everything Apple Announced at its March 8 Event: ‘M1 Ultra: Apple’s transition to its own desktop processors revolutionized performance on macOS—and made competitors step their game up. Today Apple announced the most powerful chip in the M1 family: the M1 Ultra… two M1 Maxes stuck together using a special interconnect technology dubbed “UltraFusion”… 114 billion transistors and 128GB of unified memory while maintaining “industry-leading” power efficiency…. The chip has a 20-core CPU (16 high-performance and 4 high-efficiency), a 64-core GPU, and a 32-core neural engine, for performance 8x faster than M1. Apple also says the GPU is more powerful than the most powerful discrete graphics on the market (presumably an Nvidia 3090, although Apple didn’t specify) while using 200W less power…. The Mac Studio… looks a lot like a chunkier Mac Mini… shatters performance compared to even the most expensive Mac Pro. Apple says M1 Ultra Studio offers 60 percent faster CPU performance than the top-of-the-line 28-core Intel Xeon Mac Pro. It also offers 80% faster graphics than the Radeon 6900X chip in the same maxed-out configuration…. The device starts at… $3,999 with M1 Ultra… available March 18…. The Studio Display… is a powerful 27-inch monitor, with 5K Retina resolution… a 12MP ultrawide camera… Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos… an A13 Bionic chip to handle image processing… available on March 18 starting at $1,599…
LINK: <https://thenextweb.com/news/apple-event-march-8-2022>
Thomas S. Fallows: Kiev in the 1970s, & Kyiv Now: ‘Ukraine is, and is not, a part of Russia. The two overlap but are also different…. The easy ‘offramp’ for Putin would be to find some pretext FINALLY to stop his aggression, Declaring Victory and returning back to Moscow in triumph. Solidifying Russian control of Crimea and Donbas are the easy conclusions to this tragedy. I believe that eventually, the wise people of the West will have to convince Zelensky of Ukraine to surrender once and for all Crimea and Donbas. They are not ‘worth it’ to remain in Ukraine. Russia controls them, and Ukraine should formally acknowledge this to gain the Peace…
LINK:
