Sunday, October 9, 2022

19:45, 9/20/22

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Ian Welsh2 days ago
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 18, 2022
[image: Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 18, 2022] Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 18, 2022 by Tony Wikrent *Economics as cultural warfare* *Our Ancestors Thought We’d Build an Economic Paradise. Instead We Got 2022 * Brad DeLong [Time, via Naked Capitalism 9-11-2022] Adapted from DeLong’s new book, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, published by Basic Books…. …the first half of the Big Story of twentieth-century economic history is a triumphant one. Friedrich von Hayek was a genius. He saw clearly that the market e... read more
 
mostly noise.
 
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Ian Welsh2 days ago
Open Thread
[image: Open Thread] Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent comments. Facebook Twitter WhatsApp LinkedIn read more
 
Sooner is better.  As soon as you can is best.
 
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Ian Welsh3 days ago
Understanding and Surviving the Post-Prosperity Era
[image: Understanding and Surviving the Post-Prosperity Era] I don’t usually write about my personal life much, but today will be an exception. The other day I had to go the hospital, to a cancer clinic (nothing to sweat, I have the type of cancer with a 98% survival rate) and the clinic I was at had only one doctor. It normally has three or four. I asked the nurse, and she told me that the others were out with Covid. Emergency departments across Canada are having shut-downs because they don’t have enough nurses. Covid, either temporary, or nurses having quit because they can’t ta... read more
 
Ian Welsh is sick and depressed.
 
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Ian Welsh6 days ago
Lazy V.S. Uninterested & Quiet Quitting
[image: Lazy V.S. Uninterested & Quiet Quitting] Being lazy and being uninterested are two different things. When I was a kid I was usually reluctant to do most farm work, because it was boring, but would go for 10 miles runs or long runs, or read multiple books in a day (which many people who love farm work would hate doing.) Most of what passes for lazy is uninterested in drag. The old maxim: “work is what you wouldn’t do for free” is part of it, but there are four types of activities on this spectrum. 1. “I enjoy doing it for itself and would do it even if I wasn’t getting ... read more
 
A consideration of design failure.
 
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Ian Welsh1 week ago
Solutions: Cash and Cashlessness
[image: Solutions: Cash and Cashlessness] Recently I saw the observation that you can track gentrification by the spread of shops that won’t take cash. This is a problem because a lot of people don’t have credit or debit cards, even still. It’s easy to wind up “unbanked”. It’s also the case that cashless societies have walked a fair way down the authoritarian path. The solution is simple enough: 1. make it illegal for retail stores to refuse cash. 2. Create a national “cash card”, similar to gift cards, and mandate that it must be accepted by any retailer, offline or onli... read more
 
Thumb twiddling.
 
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Ian Welsh1 week ago
China "To Those Who Have Everything”
[image: China] This is why you don’t give away your manufacturing base. China is “gaining market share in both low and hi-tech sectors.” It is “now a more important international supplier than Germany, the U.S. and Japan combined.” China’s share of manufacturing exports grew from 17% in the 2017 to 21% in 2021. The US recently put a ban on sending advanced AI chips to China, and the CHIPS act forbids any company which takes money from setting up new fabs in China, but it isn’t going to matter. Just as China jumped two chip generations (from 11 to 7nm) far faster than any western e... read more
 
Intellectual property is not an effective strategy for maintaining industrial dominance.
 
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Ian Welsh1 week ago
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 11, 2022
[image: Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 11, 2022] Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 11, 2022 by Tony Wikrent *Chile rejects new “progressive” constitution* *Chile votes overwhelmingly to reject new, progressive constitution * Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 9-6-2022] *Chilean voters resoundingly reject a new ‘ecological’ constitution * [Science, via Naked Capitalism 9-8-2022] *Lambert Strether: Here is the very first sentence from WaPo’s Editorial Board, urging rejection. “Lithium is a key input in batteries that run millions of laptops and upon whi... read more
 
Socialists imagine money as magic.
 
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Ian Welsh1 week ago
Putin’s Personal Interests and the Interests of Russia Have Diverged & The Divergence Is Running The Ukraine War
[image: Putin’s Personal Interests and the Interests of Russia Have Diverged & The Divergence Is Running The Ukraine War] So, Ukraine has had its second significant success in the war, launching a successful counter-offensive which took the important logistical center Izyum. The counter-offensive worked because the Russians didn’t have enough troops defending AND didn’t have reserves for a counter-attack (which could have turned the Ukrainian attack into a fiasco.) The Ukrainian attack was well-telegraphed in advance, and there are very consistent reports of there being a LOT of fo... read more
 
If the analysis is good Putin is in trouble.
The call up is failing and the border-guards are not helping.
 
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Ian Welsh1 week ago
Open Thread
[image: Open Thread] Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. Facebook Twitter WhatsApp LinkedIn read more
 
Sooner is better.    As soon as you can is best.
 
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Ian Welsh1 week ago
The Life & Death Of Queen Elizabeth II
[image: The Life & Death Of Queen Elizabeth II] Queen Elizabeth II in 1959 I was born in 68, and I remember the middle aged Elizabeth and the era before the Commonwealth became meaningless. There was a post-war world where people traveled freely & often between the ex-Empire nations and where economic ties between them and Britain were still primary. It came to an end when Britain went into a financial crisis so serious it required IMF intervention, and then joined the EU to get a real bailout. Once Britain was in the EU, its focus became European, not ex-Imperial. It was, in a wa... read more
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regicide#Britain
Charity comes from the crown.
 
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Ian Welsh1 week ago
We Could See The First "Flood” In A Few Years
[image: We Could See The First] Oceanographers call them marine inundation events. We’ve been trained, with climate change predictions, to think that change will be gradual, but recent events like the drying up of rivers and massive forest fires have shown us that when certain break points are reached, climate changes radically. This is also going to be true for floods or marine inundation events, and like rivers drying up, they’re going to start sooner than most people believe. This makes the ice shelves on Thwaites and Pine Island more sensitive to extreme climate change in the... read more
 
The flooding will probably be slow.
 
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Ian Welsh1 week ago
When Is the Next Oil Driven Inflation Spike In the US? December to March.
[image: When Is the Next Oil Driven Inflation Spike In the US? December to March.] Recently read a smart lad who noted a few simple things: 1. Biden’s been releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR). 2. The SPR has basically two types of oil: sour and sweet. 3. Biden has been releasing almost all sour since that’s what most US refineries need. 4. At the current rate of release, the SPR runs out of sour crude to release around March. A Bloomberg article from June noted the same issue (just prior to Joe’s begging visit to Saudi Arabia.) OilX, a con... read more
 
Oil s in surplus.  The retail price will be arbitrary.
It will be regulated by photovoltaic power.
 
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Ian Welsh2 weeks ago
The Egalitarian Rift Which Doomed The New Chilean Constitution
[image: The Egalitarian Rift Which Doomed The New Chilean Constitution] So, Chile wound up rejecting a new left wing constitution, and by a significant margin: about 2:1. This is interesting, because Chileans also wanted the old constitution replaced at about the same ratio. Apparently a big issue was that indigenous people were given rights and status and that struck many as wrong. It’s easy to see this as simple racism and colonialism, and no doubt that motivated many, but there’s something important here that should be teased apart because it’s important far beyond Chile. Egali... read more
 
The Chilean elite is aristocratic.
 
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Ian Welsh2 weeks ago
The Delusional Dishonesty of the G7 Russian Oil Price Cap
[image: The Delusional Dishonesty of the G7 Russian Oil Price Cap] So… Members of the G7 have agreed to impose a price cap on Russian oil in a bid to hit Moscow’s ability to finance the war in Ukraine. Finance ministers said the cap on crude oil and petroleum products would also help reduce global energy prices. The cap will be set at a level based on a range of technical inputs. “We will continue to stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes,” the G7 said. Russia said it would stop selling oil to countries that imposed price caps. Well, so the price cap is effectively a “we won’... read more
 
Russia need not sell fossil carbon.
 
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Ian Welsh2 weeks ago
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 4, 2022
[image: Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 4, 2022] Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 4, 2022 by Tony Wikrent *Strategic Political Economy* *US Life Expectancy Continues To Plunge Below China’s* [ZeroHedge, 9-1-2022] Life expectancy in the US has fallen for the second consecutive year as Covid-19 and overdoses increased mortality rates. An empire’s death may start with its people, and as the world shifts, China, an emerging power, has a life expectancy that is above the US and widening. According to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Preventi... read more
 
Distractions.
 
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Ian Welsh2 weeks ago
Open Thread
[image: Open Thread] Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. Facebook Twitter WhatsApp LinkedIn read more
 
Sooner is better.     As soon as you can is best.
 
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Ian Welsh2 weeks ago
Mini Electronic Vacations
[image: Mini Electronic Vacations] All right, this off-topic and not the sort of thing I usually write, but may be of use to some people. Oddly despite being “very online” I’m sort of a luddite about certain things. I didn’t have a smart phone till 2015 (and at the time had no cell phone). A friend gave me my first one, and my second is a very nice hand-me down Pixel 4 from another friend. As a rule I don’t take my phone with me when I go out. I get buy on cards. Of course, sometimes I need it, especially when traveling, but otherwise, it’s not on me. I do this because I want per... read more
 
 A good idea.

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Ian Welsh2 weeks ago
Ontario’s Mass Murdering "Top Doctor”
[image: Ontario’s Mass Murdering] I don’t consider this hyperbole: Ontario's top doctor says people who test positive for COVID-19 no longer have to isolate for five days but should stay home until their fever clears and their symptoms have improved for at least 24 hours. https://t.co/QntmqPjHcb — Toronto Star (@TorontoStar) August 31, 2022 Remember that ever since school openings, school infection rates have spiked before general community rates. Schools, as anyone who is a parent or was a child should know, are cesspools of infection even in good times. Kids get sick, pass it a... read more
 
Get the current booster.
 
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Ian Welsh2 weeks ago
Sweden’s Relative Performance In Covid
[image: Sweden’s Relative Performance In Covid] Sweden famously chose a herd immunity policy during Covid and deliberately withheld life-saving support from seniors, giving them morphine instead of oxygen when they had plenty of oxygen. It wasn’t triage, it was murder. There are many claims that they did well due to their policy. Did they? Let’s take per-capita deaths as our proxy. Sweden(196.15) did do better than the US (316.83) and the UK ( 302.59) in deaths per 100,000 population. However, they did worse than all their sister-Scandinavian states: Norway ( 72.92) Denmark (118.93)... read more
 
Sweden guessed wrong on Covid-19.
Covid can reinfect victims rendering heard immunity null. 

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Ian Welsh3 weeks ago
Destruction of the Humanities & Social Sciences and Societal Mis-allocation of Resources
[image: Destruction of the Humanities & Social Sciences and Societal Mis-allocation of Resources] Over the last couple decades there has been the rise of STEM () and the decline of the humanities and social sciences. Students want to study engineering, programming, science and so on because that’s where the good jobs are, student debt levels are obscene and there has been a social movement towards the glorification of the sciences. From the Atlantic All the good, right? Science and engineering have given us TVs, running water, power and miniature pocket computers which can make ph... read more
 
Political questions are not sufficiently debated.




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