BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-07-16 Su
…rubber meeting road, Wachtel-Lipton seriously went ride-or-die for Old Twitter, & Howes on þe industrial revolution in ironworking…
MUST-READ: Þis Is Not Unexpected:
If you want to bind people to associate and support a socio-politico-economic order in which they are, objectively, an exploited class or caste, you have to figure out someway to distract them from the reality of the resource flows of the situation. Is there any other way to do this other than to bind them in some way to some concept of identity in which they share? This binding then has to be very fierce and non-cognitive—for sharing in the identity does not mean they get any of the good things or the comfortable lives of the people who are grifting them:
Addison Del Mastro: Don’t Shoot the Message: ‘An insight on political psychology…. people who sort of “officially” oppose zoning reform or more housing or whatever it is will often express support for the underlying idea they say they oppose—if the conversation avoids the political framings that indicate to them that the idea is “owned” by the other side. I’ve had conversations where it’s almost, “Oh, wait, I know I said that, but that’s something [liberals/conservatives/socialists/whatever] say”…
That is the whole point: to make policies poisonous that would greatly improve the lives of the grifted at the expense of the comfort of the right-wing grifters. And, no, we do not have the same thing going on the left and center-left at all. Rather, the center-left is dealing with the fact that it drank too much neoliberal koolaid over the past generation and a half.
ONE IMAGE: Core & Headline Inflation Month-by-Month:
ONE Video: Elite capture: How Christianity wrote the playbook:
NIcholas Gruen: ‘Of all the podcasts we’ve done so far, this is my favourite. We discuss Peter Heather’s marvellous book “Christendom: the triumph of a Religion”…
Very Briefly Noted:
Joseph Cox: Facebook Wanted NSO Spyware to Monitor Users, NSO CEO Claims: ‘In a court-filed declaration, NSO Group’s CEO says Facebook tried to buy an Apple spying tool in 2017…
Daniel Gros: A Trade Policy for the Middle Class Will Not Save US Manufacturing [Employment]: ‘The Biden administration has turned its back on free trade, arguing that decades of globalization have not benefited US manufacturing workers. That may be true, but its new plan for a “fairer, more durable” international economic order is unlikely to improve their wages or job prospects…
Steve Vladeck: Bonus 35: The Lawlessness of Missouri’s Standing in Biden v. Nebraska: ‘Holding that Missouri could challenge the student loan program defies settled constitutional limitations on the Court’s power—destabilizing the analytical coherence of standing doctrine going forward…
Sara Morrison: The FTC’s case against Microsoft’s Activision acquisition is not going well: ‘A judge has denied the agency’s request for a preliminary injunction to stop the merger…
Paul Krugman: Almost everyone thought we’d get one, and yet here we are: ‘So it sure looks as if economists made a bad recession call. Why were they wrong?… An inverted yield curve… has historically predicted recessions…. Leaving aside all the “Biden’s socialism will tank the economy” takes, I think it’s fair to say that most economists bought into the view that we were seeing a replay of the early 1980s…
‘William D. Cohan: A Lazard Micro-Scandal: ‘Lazard is now a public company, with a market value… up 12 percent in the six weeks since the firm announced that Orszag would be replacing Jacobs…. The bigger question for Orszag to solve will be how to return Lazard back to its glory days in the 1980s and 1990s when it consistently punched above its weight…
Robin Wigglesworth: Can’t hold the capex down: ‘American firms are spending, and Goldman likes it…” & There’s a hot new hedge fund hotel: ‘Will Nvidia become this cycle’s Cisco?… Nvidia only made it into the VIP list in the third quarter of 2022, and at the beginning of the year was only the 12th most popular bet. It was still only seventh at the end of the first quarter of 2023. Someone’s been buying hand over fist…
John Cole: These Things Are Not Unrelated: ‘The entire 30-40 year slow motion climate crisis coupled with the absolute inaction of the Florida state government to do anything to stabilize the insurance market. Literally the only thing they have done in the past five years is to pass a bill holding insurers accountable for paying out claims. That’s it…
Barry Ritholtz: 10 Weekend Reads: ‘[Dan Davies:] Taleb as miseducator: People overestimate their understanding of almost everything, because they usually see the manageable uncertainty and causally explainable outcomes, missing the contingency and the possibility of something happening which is way out of their experience. (Back of Mind, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)…
Scott Lemieux: Journalists Against Journalism: ‘Jonathan Martin’s… argument seems to be that it”s “thirsty” in the pejorative sense for reporters to continue to pursue stories about powerful (right-wing) public officials…reveal[ing] things… they would prefer not to be revealed…. If these reporters wanted Martin’s approval, they should have found a story… like Hillary Clinton’s compliance with email server management best practices. Corruption on the part of Republican Supreme Court judges, on the other hand, BORRRRRR-ING…
¶s:
Emerging markets will care about global warming only to the extent it harms their populations and economies—and the more they find themselves forced to deal with it, the angrier they will be with the global north. And, as Martin Wolf points out, rightly so:
Martin Wolf: The west must recognise its hypocrisy: ‘Many countries view the US and European powers as selfish, self-satisfied and insincere…. As everyone in developing countries knows, the reason the climate problem is now urgent is the historic emissions of high-income countries. The latter were able to use the atmosphere as a sink, while today’s developing countries cannot. So, today we tell them they must embark on a very different development path from our own. Needless to say, this is quite infuriating. Nevertheless, emissions must now be sharply reduced. This requires a global effort, including in many emerging and developing countries. Have we made progress on this task, in reality rather than rhetorically? The answer is “no”. Emissions have not fallen at all…
Complaints that free ice cream isn’t tasty enough always read badly:
Matthew Lynley: Turbulence in the AI honeymoon period: ‘In an extensive thread on Hacker News and Reddit, commenters skewered LangChain. It once again revisits the potential it has as both a product and a business…. It does feel like this is one of the first of what will be many moments where very direct skepticism about emerging technology slams into public view. The honeymoon period has to end at some point…. There really has been no more divisive subject that I’ve encountered in conversations with sources, investors, and industry experts than LangChain…. The bull case for LangChain is very bullish. The ability to chain together LLMs and APIs represents a really unique proposition as developers look to create intricate products…
I thought that this would be something else: that the surface plausibility of Chat-GPT output meant that people’s initial judgments of its usefulness as a knowledge-engine front engine to databases and to unstructured idea corpuses were wildly overoptimistic. But, no, it is not that at all. It is complaints that an initial version-0.1 waters-testing is a version-0.1 program. It is not a complaint about the version of LangChain that $200 million in VC money is now building.
The most brazen legal argument I have ever seen: until the deal is closed, there is no such thing as a “lame duck” fiduciary. And more so with respect to a counterparty who really wishes that he could make the whole deal go away. The legal fees to Old Twitter’s lawyers seem to me very much worth paying, since they kept Muskrat paying $54.20:
Matt Levine: Elon Musk Blames the Lawyers: ‘When Musk decided to back out of the deal, Wachtell came in as Twitter’s lawyers to sue Musk into closing the deal. In this, Wachtell was entirely successful…. For this success, Twitter paid Wachtell a $90 million success fee…. Musk complains that this fee was too big. It was big! But it was agreed to by Twitter’s legal department and board of directors, who ran the company and got to decide how much to pay the lawyers. Musk complains that Twitter’s legal department and board of directors were “lame duck fiduciaries who had lost their motivation to act in Twitter’s best interest” because they were about to sell it to Musk…. But this is wrong. Up to the moment before closing, Twitter’s managers and board of directors were fiduciaries for their existing shareholders, and their fiduciary duty was, essentially, to make sure that Musk bought Twitter. They did their fiduciary duty, which involved suing Musk to get him to close the deal. The moment before closing, they could not have been fiduciaries for Musk, who was trying to hose the shareholders by getting out of the deal he had agreed to…
My assessment is that Bulstrode has very interesting speculations, but that actual technology transfer would have required engineers from Jamaica showing up in Britain—and that I do not believe we have any sign that every happened. And Anton Howes, who knows much more about this than I do, appears to be of the same view:
Anton Howes: Age of Invention: Cort Case: ‘Henry Cort is such a mysterious figure…. Bulstrode’s article…. There was an especially successful ironworks in Jamaica… run by a John Reeder… us[ing] reverberatory furnaces…. producing… wrought iron… turning a gigantic profit of £4,000 a year… employ[ing] about 30 “occasional” white and 76 “principally employed” black workers…. John Cort arrives in Jamaica as the master of the ship Abby. By November 1781 John Cort is in Portsmouth, England. Henry Cort… is… running a struggling ironworks… near to Portsmouth…. The British government imposes martial law on Jamaica. The new governor closes down John Reeder’s illegal ironworks…. Iron or other materials… are taken away for use on British ships, or into Naval stores. Bulstrode notes that Portsmouth is a major Naval store. In December 1782, Henry Cort boasts… he had invented an improvement to ironmaking… bundling the scrap iron, heating it in a reverberatory furnace, and then rolling it through grooved rollers, rather that the more usual smooth rollers…. From this evidence, Bulstrode makes the following claims: that a process was invented at Reeder’s mill for converting scrap iron to make it so commercially successful; that this process was invented collectively by all of the 76 black workers there; that they did so by passing bundled iron fasces through the grooved rollers of a sugar mill… that John Cort heard of this process because of the celebrity of Kwasi for killing Three-Finger Jack; that John Cort told Henry Cort of the process when he was in Portsmouth; that the naval establishment, to which Henry Cort was so connected, had the Reeder ironworks closed down to prevent competition; and that Henry Cort then used the materials confiscated from the ironworks to reverse-engineer the process… thus taking credit for it with his patent…. Bulstrode’s narrative requires multiple smoking guns to work, none of which are in the evidence she presents…