patfla

Maybe but the Japanese capture of the memory market was just as much about low costs of capital. Semiconductor manufacturing is about as capital intensive an industry as exists.

I'd note that the Koreans now own this market. Same strategy. Commoditized industry thus barriers to technological entry are not high - and low costs of capital.

I lived and worked in Japan for 6 years as a software engineer and left speaking and reading Japanese well. However I was in a joint venture quantitative investment mgmt firm and not manufacturing. Finance has its own particular views over, actually, all industries. You'll note that an important measure in the paper is stock prices.

I might add to the author's analysis: with all these countries (Japan, Taiwan, Korea and China) you have to watch the demographic curve and in particular see just how many new university graduates arrive in the economy each yr. That curve is now declining for all them - but did it start declining for Japan earlier than Taiwan and Korea? Or is the time frame involved (since the GFC) too short?

Traditional economics saw inputs as: land, labor and capital. Current understanding is more nuanced but that doesn't invalidate l, l and c. Less labor, less growth.

Perhaps, but the article itself says that Comac is having problems certifying its (first) commercial airliner. And part of what was targeted was Airbus data relating to certification.

I add (first) because I've read about the C919 elsewhere.

That's from January 2015 - much has changed since then.

The Economist writes up this history well and I learned a few things. But in particular in the conclusion, the Economist does their usual Mr-Market-knows-best, and Mr-Govt-makes-us-weak, shtick.

There are true believers of the left - and there are true believers of the right.

Part of the way I remember the early Amazon is they were bootstrapped by the fact that web purchases were, for a time, exempted from state sales taxes.

Some of that history here it would seem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_the_United_Stat...

I'd curious to see an explanation of just how the ride-sharing business might be profitable.

I assume this:

"Uber’s chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, argued that Uber’s future was not as a ride-hailing company, but as a wide technology platform shaping logistics and transportation."

implies that Uber hasn't figured it out.

Share buybacks have probably been the single largest component of 2019's market rise.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=2019+st...

in particular:

"This Stock Market Rally Has Everything, Except Investors" from the NYT.

The economy is like an (enormous) electrical circuit with, crucially, non-linear elements. Mainstream macroeconomics models that poorly which we've seen well demonstrated over the last 10 yrs although there were earlier demonstrations, e.g. stagflation in the 1970's. MMT, while as the article indicates heavily politicized, adds, I think, some insights. For one, money is not exogenous. That is, it doesn't come only from the Fed, banks also in effect create money when they write new loans. Also, what are savings (not necessarily a question raised by MMT)? They're an accounting identity in mainstream macro and supposedly investment = savings. Too simple. Why is there a 'savings glut' in E Asia at the same time that investment in China is remarkably high?

And so it goes. Some steps forward, how many back - don't know but the article does demonstrate just what a political football MMT has become - I'm sure AOC is great but I'm not sure she's an expert in economics. I'd like to see a better theory of non-linear dynamics in economics. The non-linear elements are basically feedbacks where feedbacks allow components of systems to adjust more quickly to changes elsewhere in the system. A forest fire (speaking metaphorically) clears an area of land? The first species to recolonize the land are those that get there quickest. You need to be quick when opportunity arises and feedbacks jumpstart you.

To go back to the electrical circuit - have we even adequately characterized the components (resistor, capacitor, etc.) that go into making up an economic electrical circuit? Also as regards China. China accedes to the WTO in 1999 and only 8-9 yrs later (2007-2008) the circuit blows itself out. Add a huge new power source without compensations elsewhere in the circuit and it will likely fry itself and here we are more than 10 yrs later with the smoldering wreckage still visible. Although if you've come of age in the last 10 yrs, this might not be visible to you. An interesting thing to study is global capital flows - something like the electricity of the system. There was something somewhere where Joseph Stiglitz said: we need a better theory of finance. That is, we really don't know how this shit works.

Still, opiate deaths now outnumber vehicular deaths, although vehicular death has been dropping. Opiate deaths probably skew young and one might ask: just what percent of, on average, poor impulse control young people are now killed by opiate death?

An interesting part of the article says

"SpaceX’s existing business faces headwinds. It expects to see declines in launches of its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket for 2019 and perhaps 2020. Global demand for launching commercial satellites, its core business, is stagnant, with some satellite manufacturers and customers looking to permanently exit the market segment."

Commercial satellites is broad - does the above mean that the market is stagnant for high orbit geosynchronous? If that's the case, then the advantage would be to Electron - but that assumes something about the profitability of low orbit.

A reference, where the WSJ got this information, would have been nice.

Otoh there are capabilities - and many distinctions between SpaceX and Electron. On the other though is the market and demand and you could have something great but if its market isn't likewise then you're going to be hampered not on the, shall we say, supply side of the rocket you offer, but rather the demand side.

Tit for tat.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/michael-kovrig-former-canadian-...

There's been plenty of inflation in sectors like education and healthcare except the government, conveniently, doesn't count that as 'core.'

Yes China and the US are basically the same size in area. India is smaller. What, to my mind, gets paid less attention is that the US is, in fact, the 3rd most populous nation in the world.

It's likely that the places worst hit now by global warming are a) the Arctic (but few people live there) and b) the Middle East.

Nobody really knows what Saudi reserves are. Including, very possibly, the Saudi's themselves. Moreover, very old fields and, I believe, little in the way of new discoveries.

That's odd. The gwfp.com link says:

"the Permian region in eastern Texas and western New Mexico,"

that's got it backwards actually (western TX and ...).

And the _current_ EIA's Short-Term Energy Outlook (reference by gwpf.com) says nothing about either Russia or Saudi Arabia.

I'd question the gwpf's research.

The latest weekly US production figures are here:

https://www.eia.gov/petroleum/weekly/crude.php

(3rd chart down - look at number immediately below).

In the most recent wk, 9/7, production dropped back from 11 to 10.9.

Production for SA, Russia and the US have been nip and tuck for a while and (provided capital and markets hold up) the US will likely surpass the other two - but maybe not just yet.

Just one interesting point from Daniel Bell's The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, published in 1973, was that post-industrial society would require a vast network connecting everyone, and thing, together.

One way in which I'd thought of Mercedes going back to high school (1970's) was in terms of their reliability so I was very surprised then to look in consumereports and find just how much most German auto manufacturers have fallen in their maintenance ratings - which would eliminate one reason people used to have in buying these cars.

The Model 3 has, or may have, become profitable for Tesla since the average selling price has gone from the $34K initially advertised to (last I checked) $59K. Good deal - if you're Tesla.

Amen Clinics and SPECT? Right. Google for it.

And yet Daniel Amen seems to have acquired many reasonable sounding co-authors for the paper.

I first bought GEB in the early 80's. At that point, I had only a year in college and I made little headway with the book. Went back to college and ended up double-majoring in Japanese and Computer Science and took a bunch of math courses. Have now spent something like 30 yrs as a software engineer and, in particular, I've worked with many interesting people including one mathematical logician who taught me about such as Alonzo Church and the history of functional programming languages.

So picked up GEB again a couple of years ago and found it much easier going. But then put it down again because most of the ideas, in addition to being very verbosely explained, are now old and there really wasn't a whole lot new there aside from elaborate explanation.

I imagine that the book served its purpose in its time although if not Hofstadter, someone else would probably have come along and put together the various ideas.

I was wondering how r/wsb translates to options. Ah: wsb = wall street bets. Indeed.

> half a dozen

No, the market has concentrated and is very largely dominated by just 3 companies: Samsung and SK Hynix in Korea and Micron. I don't think China has a whole lot of choice as regards memory chips in the volumes that they need. And getting new supply up and running is a yrs long process.

How is that of note?

Ah - Webster Tarpley. Kind of nutty, lots of conspiracies, but some good information nevertheless.

That said, the (very long) history of the Venetian Republic is both fascinating and important. The city of Venice (in the lagoon) is built entirely on wooden piles - astonishing both for the engineering and effort involved. Both words bank and ghetto are from Venice. Etc. Bank was originally a banca or bench on which proto-bankers or money lenders or whatever would sit.

Diesel is a different mix of longer carbon chains than gasoline and I'd think that makes it a different fuel type.

Fwiw, I thought Montier to be a well-respected behavioral economist where behavioral is in reaction to the failure of previous economic models in 2008 (the Global Financial Crisis).

Behavioral puts human psychology back into the picture.

Montier argues that SVM (shareholder value maximization) is the fig leaf that covers the change in incentivization of CEOs, and one assumes other corporate officers, away from salary and bonus to stock options. Which has been key in bifurcating the 1% away from everyone else.

Or as they say in finance, when a CEO says shareholder maximization, he or she is talking their own book. They're the shareholder they want to maximize.

SVM reframes the dialog in terms of what many people consider legitimate - return money to shareholders - and away from, say, value to employees or to society more generally. Which puts me in mind of another expression, "job creators."

I read the Meditations. It was good and I enjoyed it. It has many wise things to say and it expresses itself in a 'modern' voice. The mindset doesn't seem antiquated at all.

That said, it wasn't written for this kind of consumption and the book was repetitive. It took me longer to read than I 'd hoped.

Marcus Aurelius spent several decades before becoming emperor as a general out on Rome's borders which for the most part must have been a miserable existence and the reason, even need, for his Stoicism seems clear.

I consider it an irony of his 'wisdom' that he was the last in a line of 'good' Roman emperors who'd all been appointed by their predecessors on the basis of ability, as opposed to passed from father to son.

It was probably going to be hard to continue the tradition anyway but Aurelius passed the emperor's crown to his son and the tradition was broken. His son Commodus' reign was noticeably less successful than any of the previous five appointed emperors and Commodus was assassinated after 12 years in power.

Hmm, a not irrevelant data point.

http://allthingsd.com/20131125/fda-tells-23andme-to-stop-mar...

Energy is probably the largest industry in the world - our civilization runs on abundant energy.

The world energy industry needs to be very substantially reworked otherwise there's a high chance that many (most) of us (or subsequent generations) will die.

There are massive fossil incumbents who will be displaced.

I'd say energy.