BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2024-04-09 Tu
Fidel Castro needs to micromanage bread-baking; Arkansas sent into a state of emergency by solar eclipse; TSLA’s history as a profit-making institution; WASP ethnic food; & Large-Scale Transcontinental Societal Coöperation in the Classical-Age East-African Plains Ape, & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2024-04-06 Sa…
SubStack NOTES:
Really-Existing Socialism: Really-existing socialist leadership cults had a very different vibe than fascist ones did or that neofascists do. The fascist and neofascist vibe was one of an angry person who shared your enemies and fought them. The really-existing socialist vibe… it was much more that the maximum leader knew everything, outworked everyone, and could outthink anyone—Big Brother is, after all, watching you:
Jacobo Timerman (1990): Reflections: A Summer in the Revolution—1987: ‘I read one of Gabriel García Márquez’s essays on the Comandante…. García Márquez praises Fidel Castro for needing only six hours of sleep… If the cumulative tasks in Fidel Castro’s workday as it is described by García Márquez are counted up, the Castro who emerges is a prodigy—someone who triumphs by supernatural intelligence…. “He has breakfast with no less than two hundred pages of news… has to read fifty-odd documents [daily]…. No one can explain how he has the time or what method he employs to read so much and so fast…. There is a vast bureaucratic incompetence affecting almost every realm of daily life, especially domestic happiness, which has forced Fidel Castro himself, almost thirty years after victory, to involve himself personally in such extraordinary matters as how bread is made and the distribution of beer… <newyorker.com/magazine/1990/08/13/a-sum…>
But there is the enormous crack in the façade: Fidel Castro has to do all of this because he has no team behind him. Instead of a team, there is only “a vast bureaucratic incompetence” that is the system that Castro had designed over his then thirty years of dictatorial rule—a system that requires him to micromanage where the beer trucks go and how the bakers spend their time.
Would it not have been better for Fidel Castro to have spent less time reading documents and micromanaging consumer goods production and distribution and more time thinking about management cybernetics? The answer is “no”: for Castro, the key was not to assist the people of Cuba in becoming prosperous but rather to make himself indispensable and the possibility of moving him out inconceivable.
I am thinking about this because I am about to start reviewing Dan Davies’s soon-forthcoming “The Unaccountability Machine” for the “Times Lit. Supp.” And so I am looking for an angle to help people approach what the book is—which, at the moment, I believe is one of how to do appropriate datacenter networking design for the anthology intelligence that is humanity today.
Davies, Dan. 2024. The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—& How the World Lost Its Mind. London: Profile Books. <profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountabil…>
Stupidity: Republicans is really weird. I could understand shifting cops to places where traffic jams are likely today, but…:
Kyler Swaim: Gov. Sanders declares state of emergency ahead of eclipse: ‘Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared a state of emergency on Friday ahead of the solar eclipse, according to a news release. Sanders said in the release that she released funds from the Response and Recovery Fund to help commercial carriers transport essentials to customers in the state during the eclipse… groceries, pharmacy items, medical equipment, goods, commodities, fuel, poultry, livestock and feed…. The decision was made out of caution due to the expected increase of visitors to Arkansas “potentially causing hardships.” “We want to make sure Arkansans and all visitors have an enjoyable experience and come back again and again,” Sanders said in a statement. The order will allocate $100,000 from the fund to address program and administrative costs and will be managed by the director of the Arkansas Division of Emergency Management… <kark.com/news/state-news/gov-sanders-de…>
ONE IMAGE: TSLA as a Profit-Making—Not a Societal Well-Being Advancing, Where It Is Tops—Organization so Far…:
& Another Image: WASP Ethnic Food Edition:
Very Briefly Noted:
Economics: Felix Martin: The Unaccountability Machine—why do big systems make bad decisions?: ‘Dan Davies makes a compelling case for the use of Stafford Beer’s management cybernetics in the age of AI…. Accountability sinks… reasonable responses to …ever-increasing complexity…. Standardisation… explicit policies… procedures offer the only feasible route…. Relying on… personal discretion of middle managers would simply result in a different kind of mess. The question… how to ensure… [systems] are open to feedback, able to adapt and improve.… Two intellectual framework…. Economics… hopelessly deficient.… Worse, the… postulate of the optimality of [the] market… feeds the accountability crisis…. “Management cybernetics”… [is] a matter not of eliminating market failures, but of ensuring that the flow of information between deciders and decided-upon is kept in balance… <https://www.ft.com/content/0bb1b48f-b85a-4596-a0da-ac819bc69647>
Barry Eichengreen: Why Is Europe Losing the Productivity Race?—PROJECT SYNDICATE: ‘Labor productivity growth in the US… more than double… eurozone for the past 20 years…. Strong fiscal stimulus applied in the US…. Tight labor markets in the US may mean that firms… are impelled to substitute capital for labor…. Mario Draghi… will present the EU with… proposals… completing Europe’s capital-markets union… removing barriers to competition… greater energy efficiency and self-sufficiency…. Europe should move now to implement these old ideas. And it desperately needs to come up with new ones… <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/why-european-productivity-growth-lags-us-by-barry-eichengreen-2024-04>
Marc Perrier: Chipper: ‘The US will award TSMC $6.6 billion in grants and as much as $5 billion in loans to ramp up domestic production. The chipmaker will construct a third factory in Phoenix relying on 2-nm process technology, key for AI and the military… <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-08/chipper-the-bloomberg-open-americas-edition?cmpid=BBD040824_OUS>
Daniel Moss: AI Threatens to Dislodge Manila in the Economic Revolution: ‘Think of the Philippines workforce… United Airlines Holdings Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Cigna…. These ought to be the best of times for back offices. The business has grown to around 8% of gross domestic product from almost nothing in 2000…. When I first reported on call centers in the Philippines in 2020, the risks seemed largely theoretical, something for the long horizon. Sure, people recognized AI’s usefulness—and downside. But they took comfort in the things that AI couldn’t yet do: empathy, talking to irate customers, figuring out workarounds to problems. And having conversational English, with an American tinge. That era is passing…. The Philippines has the advantages of a young tech-savvy workforce and a linguistic heritage that should position it well—if it can keep up. Meanwhile, train an eye on where BPO money is going, and don’t let anyone assert, without fear of contradiction, popular ideas about the passing of globalization. It’s alive and well in Manila… <https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-04-04/philippines-disruptors-are-coming-for-an-outsourcing-superpower>
Gernot Wagner & Shang-Jin Wei: The Right Response to China’s Electric-Vehicle Subsidies—Project Syndicate: ‘The availability of cheap EVs is good news for the planet… bad news for shareholders and employees of Western car companies…. The United States and the European Union are considering imposing import tariffs… the wrong approach…. Subsidize domestic manufacturing… as a politically feasible, second-best alternative to carbon pricing, including as a stepping stone…. subsidy race, together with stronger efforts at pricing carbon dioxide emissions, is vastly superior to a tariff war. The world will be both richer and cleaner for it… <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/western-tariffs-wrong-response-to-chinese-ev-subsidies-by-gernot-wagner-and-shang-jin-wei-2024-04>
Central Country: Minxin Pei: China’s Economy Needs a Strategy, Not a Buzzword: ‘Xi Jinping is counting on “new productive forces” to revive growth. He is likely to be disappointed…. In practical terms, this means… electric vehicles… batteries… humanoid robots, photonic computing, nuclear fusion and manned spaceflight. Bureaucrats are expected to fall in line…. China’s manufacturing sector… accounted for nearly 32% of GDP in 2023…. The crisis-ridden real estate sector generates an estimated 20%-30%…. If Xi counts on exporting even more Chinese goods, from cars to semiconductors, he will almost certainly face a backlash…. Moreover, while technology breakthroughs could make Chinese factories more efficient, they won’t necessarily increase the size of the manufacturing sector. For example, the share of manufacturing value added in the German economy, probably the best example of “new quality productive forces,” held steady at around 20% of GDP over the past three decades, before its recent decline.<https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-04-04/china-s-new-productive-forces-won-t-revive-the-economy>
Chris Anstey: Xi Jinping’s ‘New Productive Forces’ Don’t Add Up: ‘In the run-up to the National People’s Congress (NPC), the party’s Politburo declared, “it is imperative to boost the endeavors to modernize the industrial system, and accelerate the development of new productive forces”… the electric-vehicle supply chain, artificial intelligence, renewable energy, advanced infrastructure, cutting-edge semiconductors…. President Xi Jinping putting a stamp on it at the NPC will send a powerful signal to everyone…. [But] these new productive forces are unlikely to be enough to replace the old ones—especially in the case of the property sector. And Xi’s continuing resistance to any major initiatives to lift incomes and propel consumption means China’s growth rate in coming years will fall well short of the expected 2024 target of about 5%…. An alternative economic strategy would be to focus on domestic consumption, but that would require even bolder structural reforms… <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-03-02/bloomberg-new-economy-xi-jinping-s-new-productive-forces-don-t-add-up?cmpid=BBD030224_NEF>
Di Guo & Chenggang Xu: Is Today’s China Yesterday’s Soviet Union?—PROJECT SYNDICATE: ‘The long experiment in opening up appears to be over, making economic failure all but certain…. The structure of “totalitarianism with Chinese characteristics”… combines highly centralized totalitarian control over politics, ideology, and personnel with decentralization in administrative and economic affairs…. China’s reforms succeeded… because China had managed to solve a fundamental incentive problem…. Regional economic performance would determine the promotion of local party-state bureaucrats, which led to competition between subnational bureaucrats…. Exclusive state ownership of land and the state’s banking monopoly have destabilized the Chinese financial and fiscal systems…. It now seems clear that totalitarian control over every corner of society will be strengthened. The number of moderate technocrats and their weight in party-state agencies will be reduced. Economic policy will be politically determined… <https://www.project-syndicate.org/magazine/china-today-becominig-soviet-union-auguring-economic-failure-by-di-guo-and-chenggang-xu-2022-12>
Cinema: Auntie G.: ‘Here is my chance to jump in with my Casablanca Hot Take: Ilsa never wanted to go with Rick, she just thought she had to sell herself to him in order to save the REAL love of her life: her husband. Only Rick wouldn’t let her (because he’s a big damn hero) (and this is WHY he’s a big damn hero). Re-watch the Roulette scene, where the Bulgarian girl was prepared to do the same thing (only Rick wouldn’t let her), and tell that scene isn’t a deliberate foreshadowing of the entire movie plot… <https://www.threads.net/@auntie_g_aka_saffi/post/C5cUlMmrRK9>
Jogosity: ‘The same thought struck me when I first Casablanca when I was in film school in the 90s. Soooo much of Rick Blaine in Han Solo. A friend asked me that if Rick was actually Han Solo, what would his spaceship be called. I’m forever grateful that my brain came up with the Maltese Falcon… <https://www.threads.net/@auntie_g_aka_saffi/post/C5cUlMmrRK9>