Author: Jim

economics

China passes the US

The most important, powerful, and effective weapon in the US arsenal is a fifty year old plane firing seventy year old cannons scoured from museums and looted from ancient forgotten overseas arms depots. Some people may say that the most important, powerful, and effective weapon in the US arsenal is nukes, but after all these …

economics

Externalities

About twenty percent of a car is, or should be, high quality specialty steel which is not made in America. Because there are no local sources of such steel, it is organizationally difficult to make such parts in the US, so the parts tend to be made overseas. Or, disturbingly often, made out of crappy …

economics

Protectionism

Trump, in accordance with his campaign promises to the rust belt and flyover country, has just slapped a tariff on steel and aluminum. If you look at the Nucor product catalog, you can see that the USA has ceded high end steel production to foreigners. Ceding high end steel production to foreigners is militarily unwise. …

culture

The ruling underclass

Hanson, once a neoconservative, finds himself a second class citizen in a California that is increasingly strange, alien, and dangerous. I and one of my sons have mostly fled Silicon valley. The other lives in a shrinking island of whiteness that is ever more dangerous and ever more expensive, in San Francisco near the Embarcadero, …

Uncategorized

Five more years

Scott Alexander’s predictions for the next year have become ever more cautious, thus ever more boring and ever less likely to be falsified.  And then he came up with a pile of wild assed stuff for the next five years: AI will be marked by various spectacular achievements, plus nobody being willing to say the …

culture

Losing weight

At my morning weigh in, eighty eight pounds below my maximum, despite having added a lot of muscle. I used to assume that this was because I no longer have to cook for my sick wife and hand feed her, thus relieved of continual food temptation, and that no doubt is part of it. I …

culture

On Punching Women

Many women deserve to be punched, and do not get punched, but punching a woman indicates loss of control and weakness. You should avoid getting into fights except where you can bring overwhelming supremacy to bear, and you should always be able to bring overwhelming supremacy to bear on a woman. If you have overwhelming …

party politics

What we know about the Reichstag fire.

This is unofficial knowledge, which I expect to become official in due course, in subsequent official events resembling #releasethememo. This post is copied wholesale from a certain neoreactionary of influence, except that I have spun it slightly towards my interpretation of events, rather than his. The Democrats applied the full suite of extremely powerful intelligence …