Leftism necessarily goes ever lefter. But what is “lefterâ€? Leftism has no essence, it is just a coalition to knock over the apple cart in order to grab some of the apples, so “lefter†is whatever direction looks like some apples could be knocked loose. “Lefter†could be almost anything, head off in almost any direction, depending on fashion, opportunity, and perceived vulnerability of people who have stuff. Leftism necessarily goes ever lefter, because having knocked over one apple cart, …
Category: economics
Inclusivity codes of conduct
When an open source software project adopts a “code of conduct†it slowly dies. Bugs don’t get fixed, new features break stuff, and it is unable to accommodate updates and changes in the environment. Over time, it gradually suffers bitrot – unchanging and unchangeable assumptions in a changing world, combined with “fixes†that introduce new bugs, and confusing new misfeatures that irritate old users, never quite work as they were supposed to, and are an obstacle to new users. And …
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 years, who knows if they work any more? We can no longer make tritium, we can no longer make Pu238, why should nukes have fared …
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 steel. When Jobs was creating the smartphone, he went to Corning to talk to the people who make specialty glass. If we had been importing …
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. Ceding the high end is also likely to have externalities. A network of skills unravels. If company A does something high tech, it cultivates employees, …
The disastrous effects of females in power
Women cannot do men’s jobs, and the pretense that they can and are is doing immense damage to men’s work and the creation of value by men. Women in men’s positions subtract value. Women in powerful male positions subtract enormous amounts of value. Men at work get paid for creating value, and are forced to pay women for destroying the value that men create. The reason for female under representation among top engineers, scientists, etc, is that women are slightly …
Bitcoin and the May scale of monetary hardness
The current price of bitcoin is only justified if there is a significant probability of bitcoin taking over the world, and substantially replacing other assets that are less easily transferable and/or more subject to the caprice and violence of an increasingly disorderly, unpredictable, destructive, and anarchic state. If it does take over, will rise a hell of a lot further. For example, investing in real estate rental property is lucrative, with steady modest income and impressive capital appreciation – but …
A good time to invest in bitcoin
In 2013 I recommended investing in bitcoin. Quite recently I recommended not investing in bitcoin, because my cleaning lady who has no idea what to do when her computer freezes up, is investing in bitcoin. When the widows and orphans start buying stocks, it is time to sell. Lately I have heard tell of thought criminals opening bitcoin accounts, because they noticed “Nazis†getting their accounts blocked, and figured that come the terror, they would need some money that could …
Throne, Altar, and freehold
I have argued for Throne and Altar before: Throne because a stationary bandit is better than a mobile bandit; Altar because we have to shut down open entry into the state religion: Harvard needs an Archbishop and a Grand Inquisitor to stop America’s officially unofficial state religion from holiness spiraling out of control into ever greater holiness. But throne and altar has been tried, and has failed. How did it fail? The answer is, failed because of loss of freehold. …
How to do cryptocurrency right
Proof of work tends to be inherently slow, has inherently high transaction costs, and the miner’s interests are not identical with those holding currency as a store of value and those using currency as a medium of exchange. Proof of stake is nontrival to get right. It is a form of the infamously difficult to understand (and infamously difficult to program correctly) Paxos protocol. The Paxos protocol has the great advantage over the proof of work in that after an …