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7 अगस्त 2025
Sunrise — 5:58, 6:00.
Talk about whatever you like in the comments.And please support the Althouse blog by doing your Amazon shopping going in through the Althouse Amazon link.
संदेश
39 टिप्पणियां:
PBS newshour today. First story - tarriffs. click. Second story - Illegal immigrants and those horrible people who want immigration laws enforced - Click.
Am I really supposed to believe that the PBS newshour audience of 40-70 year old college educated women really care about Tarriffs? LOL. Who is doing their programming?
I guess now that climate change has bitten the dust, we're now "Concerned" about Trump's tarriffs and international trade.
Disney finally gives in and settles with Gina Carano for having the audacity to call out BLM grift and the Branch Covidians.
Too many rats are running the House of Mouse.
It’s the whole newly minted economists thing. Economic theory atm says ‘tariffs are bad’. Trump offers proposals for better deals for the US or higher tariffs, therefore by the transitive property if equality ‘Trump is bad’….gotta feed the college educated white women lest they forget that economics class they had to take…
"The Trump administration on Thursday offered a $50 million reward for information leading to the arrest of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro."
And you know what that means?
It means we've completely fucking wasted the $760 billion we spend annually on our military, which can't seem to figure out how to kill one fucking guy.
Drugs isn't a CRIME problem, Donald. International drug cartels are NOT a problem for the Department of Justice. They are NOT equipped to do that mission.
Drugs is a NATIONAL SECURITY problem, Donald.
National security problems are dealt with by our MILITARY. Invade Venuezula and kill this fucker. Then, everybody else, such as that Mexican bitch will take the hint that we're not going to allow this any longer.
Donald Trump needs better strategies and better advisers. He's being badly served by Pam Bondi and Kash Patel ... who are a bunch of lightweights.
Man up, Don. Go down to Venezuela and grab it by the pussy hairs.
Trump, in a show of authoritarianism, issues an EO preventing the US government from debanking individuals, which the Biden administration did to him and others.
Today on Morning Toe, SecTreas Bessent gave an excellent demonstration of verbal judo.
He speaks very slowly. And he has a bit of a stutter. And he's gay. So he forces interviewers to go at his pace: they are afraid to rush him along, or interrupt him, or treat him as a hostile witness. They don't want to be seen as ganging up on such a nice old gay gentleman. And they don't want to be held responsible for starting a financial panic by making the SecTreas, of any party, look too bad.
So Joe, Mika, Eugene Robinson, and the rest had to sit there and listen to him explain how everything works. And endure his Rumsfeldian destruction of their questions' premises.
Just bloody beautiful.
RR
JSM
Just popping by to say hi.
No hosers or yohans allowed.
"which the Biden administration did to him and others."
Nope, JP Morgan and Bank of America did that to him. Were they pressured? Maybe, maybe not. They certainly folded up their tents.
Trump should direct his ire at these 2 banks and declare them national assets too important to the national security of the country to remain private.
Nationalize these banks. Then you can set the rules and the interest rates for borrowing instead of leaving this in the hands of a drug cartel ... er ... sorry ... a banking cartel. Same diff.
Capitalism is “any market-based economic system in which the means of production were owned by private proprietors."
Superb definition -- economical and efficient.
I once discussed with the late Joyce Appleby her book "The Relentless Revolution: The History of Capitalism" on why she dated capitalism to early modern England and not say the earlier trading republics of Italy. She thought that the concentration of capital under unitary control in industrial production gave industrial capitalism its tremendous compounding capability and this originated in England. Cassidy's definition with "means of production" is consistent with this concept.
My query raising the earlier trading republics was based on the powerful effect of risk reduction through insurance and the joint stock company to greatly expand trade. The vast expansion of overseas trade created a distribution framework that was then supercharged by industrial capitalism and the rise of the productive enterprise. Risk reduction is the great hidden lever behind capitalism and points to the enduring problem of concentrated risk periodically overthrowing the entire system.
Any goods producing system must distribute its production and that requires modes of exchange involving credit instruments. The tangible can only be exchanged with the intermediating help of the intangible. This raises the risk that the intangible might not be exchangeable back into something tangible--the default risk of excess intangible creation. So capitalism (and other systems) have the constant risk of being capsized by their financial systems.
Production loves scale since cost and price rule markets. State capitalism that achieves greater scale than market capitalism will prevail on the commons of open markets. The response for market capitalists is agreement-based cooperation to expand trade through free-trade policies that create comparable or superior scale.
Because capitalism is market-based, it is future adaptable.
The most powerful critiques of Trump economic policies are going to be capitalism and market based.
Dividing, disaggregating, and antagonizing 38 of the other 40 advanced economies (only Israel is exempt from chastisement) is to wreak havoc on the core of American international economic strength since the Second World War). The core of Trump's tactics is massively failed strategic thinking.
China through scale will dominate costs and prices in global industrial markets. As trade shifts towards a China-dominated global exchange, the means of financing exchange will evolve also, probably towards a more open and much less sanction-prone exchange system. Demand will eventually create a supply of alternatives.
There will come a dollar glut in relation to a relatively smaller basket of dollar-based goods in the relatively smaller dollar markets in relation to the ever-widening global markets. Dollar bonds will have to up interest rates to attract investors who will have wider choices.
The era of Washington-based coercion is coming to an end as everyone else on the globe sees the unacceptable costs of reckless coercive dollar hegemony.
James Carville, who passes for a Democratic Party centrist these days, was ranting that if the Democrats take the Presidency, House and Senate in 2028, they need to "unilaterally" admit DC and Puerto Rico as States, add and fill 4 seats on the Supreme Court. If the Republicans get SCOTUS to block any of these actions, the Democrats need to defy such rulings. When asked if the Democrats needed to run on this platform in 2026 and 2028, he allowed as how that might be necessary to claim a mandate for the actions. Pretty revealing about how desperate the whole Democrat Party has become. Like an animal thrashing around in its death throes.
PBS is now wholly dependent on its boomer retiree donors, so every story on the Newshour has to be an attack on Trump. They are having people from The Bulwark and retired IC clowns on to add harmony to the Dembots, defunded scientists and impecunious artists. Dig deep, boomers. Baby Elmo needs a new pair of shoes.
…is to wreak havoc on the core of American international economic strength since the Second World War)
Trump is not ‘wreak havoc’ on American economic strength. He is using game theory to strengthen American economic strength. It isn’t 4d chess either. It’s called tit-for-tat and game theory says it is a very effective strategy. Yes, the nations subject to this new pressure will squeal. Acting in their best interest they should squeal. It will all be okay in the end. Don’t set yourself up for yet another embarrassing lesson…
The definition of capitalism re J. Appleby is silly. The big difference in re British capitalism's development was not some sociological process, but the entirely independent factor of technology, which is its own creature, that became a breakthrough synergistic force in Britain (first), having reached a sort of takeoff asymptote, each development permitting a hundred more in an unstoppable ever more more rapid cascade that went where it willed, broke and remade all sorts of human structures without regard to human judgement. Tech might as well be a God-given phenomenon that we humans cant control, like an ice age or an upwelling of magma. This is the best argument, IMHO, against fantasies of predictable, organized economics or sociology. Nobody is building on solid ground, we are just riding a wave that we cannot direct.
Britain entered first into a tech driven economic takeoff that was the industrial revolution. It had nothing to do with colonialism or markets or organizations. It had everything to do with ironworkers copying each others ideas to make something new, which was instantly leveraged by other ironworkers. A better and more accurate way to bore out a cylinder made a new engine better suited to reducing the cost of boring out cylinders. Recursion created an intense rate of improvement.
I think every idiot economist and sociologist should be made to take a machine shop class to understand the fundamentals of human creation. Nobody should be permitted to opine on development economics without being able to cut a thread on a lathe.
From Saudi Arabia, via Instapundit:
“Saudi Arabia has no problem establishing relations with the State of Israel.Israel is a neighboring state, and no one can erase it. Hamas is a terrorist organization that has occupied the Gaza Strip.”
True
kakameister wrote:
"The era of Washington-based coercion is coming to an end as everyone else on the globe sees the unacceptable costs of reckless coercive dollar hegemony."
*****************
OK, explain how Biden , Barak or any other US president pursued "reckless coercive dollar hegemony".
Now explain why so many countries, including the EU,
have rolled over on tariffs.. Are you seriously arguing that decades of tariff policies UNFAVORABLE TO US are such a reckless coercive policy?
Explain how Washington's "dollar hegemony" has anything to do with China losing its former favorable labor cost differential as its "one-child" policy has raised its labor rates and is now biting it on its ass.
Explain why Apple is abandoning China and bringing manufacturing back here.
Explain HOW China will dominate electronic markets when we deny them access to the lastest-generation chip fabrication technology and its products.
p.s. You ignored 17th century Holland as a much better starting point for capitalism.
Nothing is off topic on this thread, which celebrates offtopicness.
A friend of mine has written a book, now published by Bombardier Books, entitled Blowback. My friend is Margaret Roberts, and she is a journalist who found herself enmeshed in the labyrinth of the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Building in OKC.
Reading this book will explain to you how things actually work in the FBI. ATF, and every major media organization in the US. No, she doesn't claim that McVeigh was innocent. She demonstrates conclusively that the guilt goes far more wide than is is comfortable for the power elite I would have entitled the book Shitshow.
Use your Althouse Amazon link to buy the book.
FormerLawClerk said...
"The Trump administration on Thursday offered a $50 million reward for information leading to the arrest of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro."
And you know what that means?
It means we've completely fucking wasted the $760 billion we spend annually on our military, which can't seem to figure out how to kill one fucking guy.
************
Is that it's mission?
Who knew?
SNORT
FormerLawClerk said...
"which the Biden administration did to him and others."
Nope, JP Morgan and Bank of America did that to him. Were they pressured? Maybe, maybe not. They certainly folded up their tents.
**************
You mean, they felt it was their patriotic duty to deny a POTUS with hundred of millions of dollars to open new accounts with them?
You wanna tell us no one pressured them to act against their own BEST INTERESTS????
I'd say you are an imbecile, but imbeciles would object as being much smarter.
Thanks for the link to your friend Margaret Roberts book Blowback, Ampersand! I will order it. I already read The Third Terrorist by Jayna Davis, which covers a Middle East connection. Interesting read. There is so much our own FBI hides from us.
Buwaya, that is a very interesting concept of technology creating its own momentum. But I don't think it's the whole explanation. Why did it happen first in England?
Because England had the cultural infrastructure for tech to develop.
For a real tech explosion, you need a culture where my idea is my idea - respected, protected just enough (by a patent system that simultaneously publicizes and monopolizes it), not suppressed by elites who don't need the idea to be elite, or stolen by elites who want to use it for themselves and completely disregard my status. You need a culture where the better idea is adapted no matter who proposes it, and the proponent of the worse idea loses out no matter who he is. You need a legal system that enforces contracts, but more importantly a culture where you can reasonably expect the other guy to honor the contract anyway.
In other words, you need a high-trust, truth-based culture. Which northern Europe and specifically Great Britain developed first.
The Industrial Revolution could have happened hundreds of years earlier, but it took all that time for the cultural infrastructure to develop.
RR
JSM
Assets are owned while labor is contracted for. The capitalist combines the two to produce output. One a property asset, the other a contracted for service, the contract being asset-like.
Its called technological determinism, at least on one level, and that may go back to Marx. I.e., that the nature of tech mutates society, etc., that causality starts with tech, not with social structures. I am told by wiki that Thorstein Veblen wrote on this but I cant say, I've not read much of Veblen. But the internal dynamics of tech development, of its autonomous self creation, I can only credit a 1980s lecture we had at the Asian Development Bank, and it struck me at the time as the bleeding obvious.
I dont think you can credit social structures as facilitating thus because we were witnessing autonomous development ourselves in the anarchic world of 1980s software. Stuff was just being done by people who needed something, no patents or copyrights or anyones permission. All I have read of the development of the ironmongery aspect of 18th-19th century tech seems just like that - a better mine pump was a need just like a better compiler. If you want to credit something perhaps we can say it was open communication in England, which was just the right combination of tech-geek density and scale, developers were numerous enough and close enough together to create synergy. Though in those days actual comms were just on horseback and face to face in taverns and coffee shops.
Development goes on independent of the wishes of the owners of assets or the plans of management. Change happens without contracts. Ideas emerge, they are pursued underground or in unofficial "skunk works" (see Peters and Waterman), and in those days they physically wandered elsewhere in the heads of techs seeking other gigs, often to competitors. It cannot be controlled, even in a police state.
I'm posting link to Scott Alexander's Substack to share a piece of writing. It's one the reviews that he has structured a contest around, and it is the most pleasurable piece of reading I've done in ages.
My Father’s Instant Mashed Potatoes
Mass Exodus From Organ Donor Registries Following Media Coverage (Newsweek)
"Thousands of Americans have removed themselves from organ donor registries following "irresponsible reporting" led by the New York Times, officials said.
The Association of Organ Procurement Organizations, a trade group that represents 46 of the nation's 55 federally designated nonprofit entities that help facilitate donations, accused the newspaper of a "lack of balance and accuracy" in its recent coverage of the problems in the sprawling transplant system.
The letter, sent to three Times editors on Tuesday, cited two articles from July 20, including "A Push for More Organ Transplants Is Putting Donors at Risk," in which reporters Brian M. Rosenthal and Julie Tate detailed rushed or premature attempts to retrieve organs from patients who were, in some cases, still showing signs of life.
A third recent Times item, an op-ed written by three cardiologists in which they argue for a "new definition of death" to help alleviate the backlog of recipients in need of transplants, was not included in the letter. The essay has gone viral on X, with many users commenting it has made them rethink or actively change their status as organ donors."
Oops.
“ Development goes on independent of the wishes of the owners of assets or the plans of management. ”
Thanks Buwaya and Mosby, tech development is a wild creature with goals of its own, isn’t it. I have wondered if Homo Sapien’s victory over Neanderthal was the result of tech destroying the innocence of the garden, perhaps to our benefit.
I have thought that the reason a cold wet island like England came to rule the world for a time was that its aristocracy was so powerful yet so venal and stupid that the merchant class and the inventors had no choice but to change the balance of power by creating an indomitable wealth advantage. Not a red revolution but a tech one.
In the US it seems staged, the intrenched descendants of the innovators of the past are overturned by a new breed of innovator.
The interactions of technology and culture are the focus of Peter Hall's "Cities in Civilization." Fascinating case studies across the last few millenia.
Mezzrow--that is a fascinating essay. Thanks for the link.
I would characterize the derivatives that helped to propel the 2008 subprime mortgage disaster as IMPish products.
Mad Town Guy--"The Meaning of Life" was a documentary.
"Nobody should be permitted to opine on development economics without being able to cut a thread on a lathe."
Hear! Hear! What do you want. SAE, Metric, BA, Whitworth?
But before we start thanking Henry Maudslay we should first thank Joseph Whitworth for his method of generating flat surfaces. Although I suspect the makers of the Antikathera device probably used a similar method.
“ Development goes on independent of the wishes of the owners of assets or the plans of management. ”
Yes. Because it is an act of creation. Human beings don't have to be taught to be curious. We're curious by nature. We don't do this because we desire change. We do this because we desire answers.
I had started to feel disenchanted with the tenor of the Althouse comments threads recently. My faith has been restored by this one. Thanks everyone!
@rehajm
I agree it’s not 4D chess — it’s closer to a repeated game. Tit-for-tat fits that model: start with cooperation, match the other player’s last move, and over time you can stabilize into mutual cooperation if both sides value the future.
In repeated games, the key to predicting moves is knowing the player’s payoff function. Here it’s probably a mix — economic gain and domestic political capital — which puts the “best” move somewhere on the Pareto frontier of trade-offs.
I think people use “4D chess” to express a one-sided asymmetric information game, where he has private information the others don’t. That gap can be strategic, but if it’s not real, the whole plan rests on a false premise. And in truth, none of us — maybe not even the players — know exactly what game is being played. That’s what makes it interesting.
Buwaya et al: I get what you're saying about tech development just happening regardless of laws. But I think you're overlooking that eventually the ideas have to be manifested as products or services, in the physical world, that elites with thugs and spears and guns rule over.
The buzzing communication among artisans stops cold when the mandarin sends some soldiers into the artisan quarter and strings up a few of them for unauthorized innovation. And/or kidnaps one and takes him back to the castle and commands him to innovate but not talk to anyone about it.
Northern Europe already had a culture of small government (both geographically small, so you could walk to the next principality if you didn't like this one; and subject-matter small, as in it didn't try to regulate every single thing) and respect for individuals. Tech was able to develop there because the people were already free.
But of course there then developed a virtuous cycle in which tech enabled freedom, which enabled tech. This happened with my hobbyhorse the printing press.
RR
JSM
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