BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2024-02-08 Th
Starting to raise my estimate of the neutral rate of interest r; partisan polarization & confidence in the economy; Roman Pompeii; & hexapodia podcast on the fading “vibecession”; what is the Fed thinking in not cutting right now?; doing better gen ed than Hum 1 & Soc Sci 2; lecturing of post-1870 technology-growth acceleration; debt & deficits as potential problems; & BRIEFLY NOTED: for 2024-02-02 Fr…
SubStack NOTES:
Economics: And so I raise my estimate of the neutral interest rate r by 0.01%-point. Payroll employment, seasonally adjusted, looks to have been 479,000 higher in mid-January than we had thought yesterday that it had been in mid-December:
Bureau of Labor Statistics: January Employment Situation Summary: ‘Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 353,000 in January, and the unemployment rate remained at 3.7 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in professional and business services, health care, retail trade, and social assistance. Employment declined in the mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction industry… <https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm>
ONE IMAGE: Partisan Polarization:
ONE VIDEO: Roman Pompeii
Very Briefly Noted:
Economics: Noah Smith: Three reasons the Federal Reserve is likely to cut interest rates soon: ‘Productivity growth looks like it’s accelerating…. Keeping rates high for a long time increases financial risks…. Markets are expecting a cut…. If those assumptions prove false… more businesses… [could] go bust…. We could thus end up turning a soft landing into a hard landing…. A) keeping rates at the current level for a long time increases the danger of a recession, and B) fast productivity growth makes it less likely that rate cuts will lead to inflation… <http://www.noahpinion.blog/p/three-reasons-the-federal-reserve>
Noah Smith: ‘China is trying to produce a huge amount of EVs, batteries, solar panels, steel, and semiconductors, in order to plug the massive hole left by the destruction of much of its real estate industry. This is likely to lead to a global trade war… <https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1754482504973627709>
Neofascism: Binyamin Appelbaum: ‘“Republicans who have spent months demanding that any aid to Ukraine be paired with a crackdown against migration into the U.S. got what they asked for when a bipartisan group of senators released a $118.3 billion agreement that would provide both. On Monday, many of them rejected it anyway… <https://bsky.app/profile/bcappelbaum.bsky.social/post/3kkpflzoxmv2l>
Journamalism: Gillian Branstetter: ‘I’m determined to fight for a future where it is possible for The New York Times to be shamed for responding to an eliminationist campaign targeting a marginalized community by comparing that community to a contagion… <https://bsky.app/profile/gbbranstetter.bsky.social/post/3kkglxfny3k2e>
Human Capital: Carlos Noreña: ‘California State University (CSU) is the bedrock of public higher education in California. It’s an unparalleled engine of upward mobility for the nearly 500,000 students (!) throughout the system, many of them first-gen or from minoritized groups. The faculty make this miracle possible. PAY THEM… <https://bsky.app/profile/carlosfnorena.bsky.social/post/3kjdudixdej2r>
Science Fiction: Jo Walton (2008): Happiness, Meaning and Significance: Karl Schroeder’s Lady of Mazes: ‘How does humanity govern itself when nothing is natural? And if a Chinese Room started to attack your home, how would you fight against it?… <https://www.tor.com/2008/08/14/happiness-meaning-and-significance-karl-schroedera8217s-lady-of-mazes/>
Annette Gordon-Reed: Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: ‘Garry Wills was not the first to adopt this view of Sally Hemings’s alleged situation. In 1802, in response to a query from Jonathan Dayton, a Federalist operative looking into James Callender’s allegations, Thomas Gibbons described Hemings as “the most abandoned prostitute of her color–pampered into a lascivious course of life, with the benefits of a French education, she is more lecherous than the other beasts of the Monticellian Mountain.“19 Hemings could not just be a slave woman living on a plantation involved in a long-term affair with her master, like her sister down the road in Charlottesville, Mary Hemings. She could not even be a simple prostitute; she had to be “the most abandoned”…
Metaversity: June Wan: I tried Apple Vision Pro for a weekend and here are my 3 biggest takeaways: ‘Whether you’re buying the $3,500 spatial computer or not, keep these three things in mind as Apple learns, adapts, and evolves the Vision Pro into something greater…. The killer app… [is] the ecosystem…. AirDropping spatial videos from my iPhone, seeing the “Connect” bubble appear when I lift open my MacBook, and seamlessly moving my mouse cursor from the Mac Virtual Display to the various floating windows…. The hardware is ahead of its time, and that is good news…. Once it’s on, you’re isolated, immersed, lonely… <https://www.zdnet.com/article/i-tried-apple-vision-pro-for-a-weekend-and-here-are-my-3-biggest-takeaways/>
Matthew Panzarino: Vision PROMO: ‘The Apple Vision Pro takes technology decades in building and makes it seem like nothing special is happening. And that’s a win…. The resolution and enormously sticky pinning enabled by ridiculously good spatial mapping are acting as a huge reset button for XR. Apple is doing what Apple does best: establishing a new Minimum Viable Experience…. There are so many technological plates spinning here it’s been pretty remarkable to see just how many hard things were executed so well that they’re essentially not topics of conversation… tough problems of XR… polished to such a high sheen that they’re simply not even being talked about…. If you can do stuff so good it’s invisible, you’ve nailed it. <https://www.theobsessor.com/vision-promo/>
Moral Philosophy: John Ganz: Reading, Watching 01.21.24: ‘I checked out Stephen Holmes’s Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism to brush up. I found it hard to put down… <popularfront.news/p/reading-watching-012124>
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