chart from this paper “The Case for Public Investment in the EU” https://www.ies.be/files/IES_Policy_Brief_2019_06_Paolo_Pasimeni.pdf
amid a global savings glut I add this chart from how-washington-learned-to-love-the-deficit where they argue that the US government is testing the limit of how much they can actually borrow
after world war 1 US becomes biggest lender and at once protectionist. Borrowers were forced to economic autarchy to serve the external debt
China and US are undergoing the great disentanglment, more symbolic than actual so far but a good start.
fun history fact: Norman Angell “The Great Illusion” forecasted in 1910 no war because of shared economic interests. He was proven spectacularly wrong but in the end he was absolutely right: war was a disaster for all the countries that fought it
Then we should note that wars can happen despite shared economic interests, race for the bottom of nationalists and populists.Breaking globalization can have handsome domestic payoff
(Shuttercock)
well, not quiet, the article is the story of the hot debate around Hawking’s shuttercock model
“In the 1940s, Feynman devised a scheme for calculating the most likely outcomes of quantum mechanical events. To predict, say, the likeliest outcomes of a particle collision, Feynman found that you could sum up all possible paths that the colliding particles could take, weighting straightforward paths more than convoluted ones in the sum. Calculating this “path integral” gives you the wave function: a probability distribution indicating the different possible states of the particles after the collision.
Likewise, Hartle and Hawking expressed the wave function of the universe — which describes its likely states — as the sum of all possible ways that it might have smoothly expanded from a point.”
https://mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com/2016/04/19/man-becomes-the-sex-organs-of-the-machine-world/
artists adjust faster to technology chage and become visionary and oraculars”
McLuhan prefers so a poetic tone and prose
Communication is transforative not only because it alter the physical and social boundaries of everyone’s reality, but because they change the metaphors and the perceptual tools available to interpretation
medium is the message “The boldness of his writing lay in its assertion these tools and media were not merely convenient adjuncts and servants to a lofty and autonomous human nature; rather, the tools and media themselves were an integral part of the crucible wherein that human nature and its underlying worldviews were formed”
China has a lead in medium range land launche missiles due to old nuclear agreement, and has developed “carrier killers” to keep the US fleet at bay
Reuters: Special Report: New missile gap leaves U.S. scrambling to counter China
US ha trouble with anti-ballistic missiles which do not seem to perform right, that is the archivolt of the strategiuc doctrine which in turn apperas shacky
Scitific American article: Broken Shield issue June 2019, no link
The president was expressing extraordinary faith in the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system, currently the country’s sole guard against intercontinental ballistic missiles that carry nuclear warheads. But his faith was woefully misplaced, and facts belie his claim. U.S. military testing data show there is no basis to expect GMD interceptors to work more than about 50 percent of the time. Using multiple interceptors against each target could in some cases improve these odds but will not funda- mentally change the situation. The chances of a nuclear weapon getting through in a real-world attack using multiple missiles is still dangerously high. Our analysis of all 19 tests done—the most recent one was in late March—as well as several government re- views of the program, shows an alarmingly high failure rate.
“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us” — Marshall McLuhan
Ben Evans “Hence, channeling Marshall McLuhan, new tools start out being made to fit the existing workflows, but over time the workflows change to fit the tools.”
https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/5/21/office-messaging-and-verbs
In a post speaking of Slack and sw envirnments for productivity
“Ironically, Lotus Notes, one of the earliest corporate messaging programs, was intended to be much more than email, calendaring and so on – there was a vision of a unified development environment, database and messaging system – ‘groupware’. It didn’t quite work out like that, and actually using Lotus Notes as I had to 15 years ago was rather like using an email client built with Microsoft Access – theoretically possible but not a very good idea. OLE in the 1990s was another concept that didn’t quite work, embedding pieces of one program’s document inside another. But today, Facebook’s platform on the desktop is pretty much Ray Ozzie’s vision built all over again but for consumers instead of enterprise and for cat pictures instead of sales forecasts – a combination of messaging with embedded applications and many different data types and views for different tasks. Hence, one could propose one future model as ‘Facebook for the enterprise’, but with the platform, not the social, being the point of the analogy.”
started from a post on Microsoft capitulation, giving up on Windows everywhere which in hindsight helped to go back on top of the tech world
https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/7/8/capitulation
This is turning into Ben Evans quotes “That is, Google tests new opportunities to see if they fit in the same way that a shark bites a surfer to see if they’re a seal. If not, you don’t change Google to fit the opportunity – you spit out the surfer (or what’s left of him). ”
Google as a “vast machine learning engine”
https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/4/14/what-does-google-need-on-mobile
Fed paper where lump sums paid today are payments from the future generations for the environment benefits they receive due to the carbon tax
reasoning on this, it is like shared economy workers, new app-dependent freelancers are digging their won grave by working with Uber.
App economies give increasing return to scale, capital piles up into winners, dominant positions are achieved and used to push labor-saving autonomy technologies that are not yet developed nor ready for market. Dominant position in this way have a distortionary effect which will have self-fulfilling effects on employment.
But in the end it is not just automation and AI to create unemployment, it will be monopolies striving for labor-saving technologies while resources could have been used to augmenting solutions.
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here Huawei founder seems to suggest that AI will bring industrial advantage back to countries most educated with most capital to spend, a polarization in international economic performance, where Switzerlad with robots will produce like a country of 80 millions, Germany like a 800 million contry etc. One order of magnitude, exponential technology. While less “developed” countries (less capital, less skills) will keep producing things not apt for robots and achieve le scale/network economies.
(ITW is here http://xinsheng.huawei.com/cn/index.php?app=group&mod=Bbs&act=detail&tid=4279851)
1500-Pound Goat 