Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.
John Quiggin 
After Britain’s Brexit and Americas Trump I hope the coming referendum doesnt prove to be our moment of national self immolation ,the moment when the mask fell off . Years of complacency from progressives and opportunistic dog whistling from conservatives laid the ground for this . It isnt perfect ,it leaves lots of disadvantaged groups out ,but its all that is on offer and its worth a try .
ASIC, James Shipton, a billionaire by common wealth and a ‘newscorpse’:
“Defending Australian institutions
SEPTEMBER 27, 2018
“Turnbull promised something better but was, if anything, worse than Abbott. So far, it seems as if Morrison is going to continue the trend. ”
… as is the culture in Treasury with the present encumbants.
James Shipton has been treated appallingly.
“James Shipton’s extraordinary open letter about ASIC is a reminder whistleblowers should be treated with respect”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-04/james-shipton-letter-asic-experience-treasury-jim-chalmers/102804900
Accommodation Discrimination. Regulatory Capture. Zero Trauma informed processes. Hung, on the clothesline out the back, seared by faux blowtorches funded by our common wealth billionaire, pointing at a person, not the Institutions. By a zombie ‘news’ purveyor. To dry.
James Shipton needs an award for bravery. Treasury – a Royal Commission.
Shameful.
I think the referendum on “the Voice” is a secondary issue; a distraction from a far more important first order issue for humanity of the existential risk to human civilisation.
I’d suggest without a viable human civilisation in the coming decades, “the Voice” will be moot.
Dr Andrew Forrest AO explained the practical steps needed to accelerate collaboration, stop global warming and build a green energy economy in the Asia-Pacific, at the Boao Forum for Asia Perth 2023, on Wednesday, 30 Aug 2023.
Forrest declared in a presentation slide (from time interval 0:03:35):
Forrest concluded with (from time interval 0:23:11):
“Because it’s business – I need you to know – it’s business which is causing global warming. It’s business which will kill your children. It’s business which is responsible for lethal humidity. But it’s policies which guide business. You, must hold us, to account. Don’t let us, with our clever advertising, blame you the consumer, or you the public or individual – that’s rubbish. Business, guided by government, will either destroy, or save this planet. Hold us to account – the power of you.
Thank you. Make us change. That’s all I’m asking you to do – make us change. Thank you very much.”
See Dr Forrest’s presentation in the YouTube video titled Dr Andrew Forrest AO speaks at the Boao Forum Asia, duration 0:24:10.
Regarding “the existential risk to human civilisation”, and scale of change, rate of change, and reliance on natural science…
Near any and/or all Australian First Nations’ retained deep knowledge of “caring for country” and “living on country” is, sadly, also rapidly reaching its use by date.
Thence forward, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
Climate dictatorship, comment 8 and last
Conclusion
So far I have covered electricity generation and land transport. That is unfortunately only half of Australia’s GHG emissions, 480 Mt CO2-e in the year to March 2022. Government data on the breakdown: https://www.dcceew.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/nggi-quarterly-update-march-2022.pdf (there’s an update to December but it leaves out land use changes).
Electricity is responsible for 32.8%, transport including aviation 18.6%, together 51.4%.
The other half is a miscellany: Other stationary energy 21.0%, fugitive emissions 10.3%, industrial processes and product use 6.7%, agriculture 16.1%, waste 2.7%, land use change and forestry – 8.1% (net sequestration). The text blames the LNG export industry for growth in stationary energy and fugitive emissions. The net zero crash programme would presumably close down this industry at short notice as a conspiracy to commit climate crime. That still leaves about a third of emissions unaccounted for.
The categories are not very helpful. If we reorganize by technology, they include:
buildings heated with gas, steel, cement, miscellaneous manufacturing, aviation, shipping, farming, and bulk hydrogen. Each of them is technically specific and has to be analysed separately.
I’m not up to working through these complexities just now, and I fear I am already stretching the tolerance of my readers. Even if I tried, there is a structural difficulty. Renewable electricity and electric vehicles have been mature technologies for over a decade, and in mass production. There is no doubt about the technical feasibility of even a very rapid transition. This does not hold for the remaining sectors. Some, like heating buildings with electric heat pumps and electric river shipping, can be considered solved. Others, like hydrogen DRI steelmaking, zero-carbon cement, and shipping with methanol or ammonia as fuel, exist only at the scale of pre-commercial pilots. Others still are frankly still shiny prospectuses, like electric aviation. We cannot be certain that a rapid decarbonisation in all of them will even be technically feasible by 2030, though it is highly probable in most cases. The cost is still guesswork.
The best I can do for now is a Bayesian starter assumption that the cost of decarbonising this last third of the GHG emissions will be a similar order of magnitude to the two thirds we know more about. So we will just pencil in the mean.
The final summary table of net outlays for net zero in Australia by 2030:
·······························Annual average········Share 2022 GDP········Total 7 years
• Electricity:····················A$ 52.7 bn······················2.4%················A$ 369 bn
• Land transport:··············A$ 84 bn·······················3.8%················A$ 595 bn
• Everything else:···········A$ ? 67 bn···················? 3.1%··············A$ ? 466 bn
(placeholder)··
“Totals”························A$ ? 143 bn···················? 9.2%··········· A$ ? 1,430 bn
I have not included here the large cuts in the cost of the electric transport transition from hardball policies by OzCar. These are realistic, but then we could have nasty surprises in the “others” sectors on which we have very poor information.
Your first reaction is likely to be “this guy is nuts”. I have two points to make in response. One, this is less than a quarter of the effort made in WW2 on war production by, among others, the USA (40% of GDP in 1944, including 296,000 aircraft over 5 years). Impossibility is a political judgement, not a technical fact – and far greater efforts have been made in living memory.
Two: are you so sure that Paris gradualism is going to be sustainable politically, implying as it does a best case in which the climate steadily deteriorates for the next 27 years? From what I experience when I open the front door in a Spanish August, and see every day on the TV news, nature is not cooperating with gradualism. Perhaps we should all stop cooperating too, including me (mea culpa).
Another simple point is that the spending is not new. The Paris goal of net zero in 2050 means that all the investment in zero-carbon and net-negative kit is already committed. All we are doing is bringing it forward in time, and in later years will enjoy large savings compared to the gradualist alternative. The crash programme is analogous to saving for retirement, which we all do as a matter of course. There will be some real one-off costs from forgone technical progress. On the other hand, there will be large one-off gains, in reduced health costs and damage, from bringing emission cuts forward, of the order of A$100 bn in Australia for acceleration by one decade.
Bear also in mind that the disorientating trillions are simply the mathematical consequence of looking at less threatening hundreds of billions in the proper horizon of a decade. Finally, the growth rate of real Australian income per capita over the last decade has been almost exactly 1% a year. My unthinkable proposal would mean a temporary return of living standards to those of 2014. Do you remember the hunger marches and the daily Mad Max armed struggle in the suburbs for food, water and fuel? Me neither.
This wasn’t about Australia really. I used you as an analytically convenient example of a rich and culturally congenial country. Any lessons, and most errors, will apply to other similar ones like Spain. The dictatorship I invoked is that of the Roman Republic, not its debased twentieth-century imitators: a fully constitutional office, activated only in dire emergencies, granting the holder both normal and extraordinary powers for a limited period. Article 16 of the French constitution, applied just once, is a good modern example.
For my doodle to become practical politics, there has to be a major shift in sentiment, of the order of the change in attitudes to Germany among the British ruling class in the 1930s. The intelligentsia can’t create this, but it can enable it with facts, analysis – and visions. My key practical recommendation to readers is to think outside the box of Paris gradualism, and study and talk about the potential for much more radical action to save the climate. We need a great deal of professional modelling done on the lines I have inadequately sketched here, as well as work to draw lessons from the mechanisms of the war economies in both the great conflicts of the 20th century.
Thinking big does not imply commitment to the particular targets I have suggested here. It does open up new terrain for discussion. For example, consider the impact of a short delay, such as setting a net zero target of 2033, ten years from now instead of seven. What are the benefits and losses from this?
If you are even partly convinced, do spread the word. “This stuff is off the wall, but he’s on to something.” Thanks anyway for reading this far.
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Previous comments in this series :
1. https://johnquiggin.com/2023/07/18/monday-message-board-running-late/#comment-261523
2. https://johnquiggin.com/2023/07/18/monday-message-board-running-late/#comment-261551
3. https://johnquiggin.com/2023/07/24/monday-message-board-607/#comment-262100
4. https://johnquiggin.com/2023/08/07/monday-message-board-608/#comment-263121
5. https://johnquiggin.com/2023/08/14/monday-message-board-609/#comment-263231
6. https://johnquiggin.com/2023/08/21/monday-message-board-610/comment-page-1/#comment-263447
7. https://johnquiggin.com/2023/08/28/monday-message-board-611/#comment-263845
I welcome corrections. Unfortunately the blog software does not allow me to edit or correct comments, as a blogger can with their posts. I have assembled the series in a single document that you can shortly download, and I may well correct it: http://www.jameswimberley.es/Notes/Climate_dictatorship_compendium.docx
Download tested in Firefox and Chrome.
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Coda on Leslie Groves
The blockbuster film Oppenheimer makes the physicist the centre of the story of the first atomic bombs. General Leslie Groves, the US Army officer who headed the Manhattan Project, becomes a mere cameo part for Matt Damon. Fair enough, if your concern is science or ethics. From our climate perspective, Groves is more interesting. There is no great scientific challenge left in making the transition to net zero, and the ethics are uncomplicated – we do it or civilisation dies. It’s a matter of politics and organisation, in which Groves excelled.
He was in some ways typical of the hard-driving managers who created the incomparable American war machine under Roosevelt. His position was however in one way unique. He was granted an extraordinary degree of autonomy, and un turn used it to delegate. He authorised his deputy Kenneth Nichols, another Army engineer, to give final approval to contracts up to $5 million – equivalent to $85 million in today’s money.
This autonomy was not an unearned privilege awarded from negligence or favouritism, but a logical consequence of the atomic project. Suppose Marshall had wanted to subject Groves and Nichols to the normal checks on spending within the Pentagon. Think of the gear they were very expensively buying: including machines to concentrate U-235 by gaseous diffusion. The first four prototypes, made in Britain, cost £150,000. The technology was completely new, quite outside the experience of Pentagon financial controllers. What on earth were these costly gadgets for? To work on the file at all, they would have to be read into America’s greatest war secret, expanding the circle of insiders and the grave risk of a breach of security. If this risk were taken, what could they usefully contribute, with no previous institutional experience to draw on? It wasn’t at all like Frigidaire’s machine guns, a weapon that everybody in the Pentagon understood and many had fired in training. The only practical solution was to forget about the controls and let the Project insiders get on with it.
The lesson to be drawn here is not to abandon democratic accountability and regular procedures in general, but to relax the rules where you have to to save the Republic. The Ghost Climate Advisory Committee of Groves, Monnet, Rathenau and Scipio concurs.
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In our system, the money / finance nexus is the root of all our human and environmental problems. Nothing less than the radical transformation of money, finance and markets, as we know them now, can or will save us.
The crux of the problem is the belief (for that is all it is) that money and markets can value things. They cannot value things in any essential or objective way. They do not value against any objective standard or yardstick. They operate, along with laws and regulations which usually favor capital over labor, to define values by prescription, by administration, not to measure values. This is a long argument of course and not suitable for a Monday Message Board (MMB).
If the argument holds (and I consider it demonstrable) then close to the entirety of classical and neoclassical economics is fallacious. When the founding assumptions are fallacious everything that follows is fallacious.
The proof that conventional economics of all schools is fallacious is in the empirical pudding. The world is a collapsing unsustainable mess leading to an immense catastrophe on the current course. Neither human populations nor environment can survive this in any good or reasonable shape. Clinging to any and all essential elements of our current system will completely fail to avert this catastrophe. I refer to money, fiance and markets. Nor can we instantly change this system into an entirely new one.
However, we need to envisage the transformation which obsoletes many of the current functions of money, finance and markets which must be abolished in their entirety or reduced to rumps of their current functions. In short;
(a) Money becomes a non-valuing “permission to consume”.
(b) Markets become distribution by purchase and “quantity surveying” calculated scientifically according to survival goals,
(c) Finance as currently understood is abolished.
(d) Property beyond private property to fair, equitable value for all becomes public property.
All valuing of the material must be quantitatively scientific. All assignment of resources, good and services to persons must be equitable and ethical. Money and income producing property, as opposed to life supporting property to an equitable level, can have nothing to do with it.
“James said: “It’s a matter of politics and organisation”.
Yes. Hence my 20% on costs to deliver public acceptance and to monitor your plan.
– 9-ish% of GDP in 2030. Tough!
– And 2014 living standards. OK.
– And $100bn in Healthcare savings.
I’m onside.
Doable if a war footing, yet like trying to develop nuclear, we will have 10yrs worth of PR and lobbying against a war footing and stranded assets.
Here is the difference in what they say vs what they do via Clean Creatives (it would seem “comparative advantage” – the market – won’t solve for a 2030 ney zero);
“‘Fossil fuel advertising and PR does not match business reality. Shell has admitted that their “operating plans and budgets do not reflect Shell’s Net-Zero Emissions target” that is widely featured in their advertising. In 2020 and 2021, 80% of Chevron advertisements mentioned sustainability, while only 1.8% of their capital spending went to non-oil and gas projects.”
https://cleancreatives.org/learn-2022
Proposed theme song to boost Net Zero 2030…
“James Wimberley says:
August 7, 2023 at 6:10 pm
“Climate dictatorship and net zero in Australia by 2030, comment 4
… “The real difficulty is the collective action / free rider problem”
And a wag here provided the lyrics:
Ronald Brak says:
October 24, 2013 at 6:37 am
“Free riders on the storm
…
https://johnquiggin.com/2013/10/23/free-riders/#comment-147551
Hope your arm is back to normal James. And I am already using you targets in conversation, and introduced with your line: “This stuff is off the wall, but he’s on to something.”
Upsetting at first to those who don’t think of such things. And a great tool for getting the conversation going.
Thanks for writing this far!
James, you’re still my internet hero!! Thank you for being you.
And I hope the arm is coming along.
Published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on 4 Sep 2023 was an op-ed by David Spratt headlined Betting against worst-case climate scenarios is risky business. It included:
Leon Simons posted a tweet on Sep 5 (including a graph):
And per another tweet by Leon Simons, also on Sep 5, the Earth is apparently becoming less cloudy.
Ikonoclast is right in pointing out the failure of capitalism and neoclassical economics. Money has failed its primary function which is as a measure of value. Early capitalist theory would assign characteristics of money observed since the times of Ancient Rome and early on in Imperial China.
Durability: Money can last for a long time and withstand wear and tear.
Portability: Money is easy to carry and transfer from one person to another.
Divisibility: Money can be divided into smaller units without losing its value.
Uniformity: Money is standardized and recognizable by everyone.
Limited supply: Money is scarce and not easily available.
But certain problems arose from the very beginning. The portability of money made it easy to steal and hard to resist use for impulse buying. Its divisibility led to absurd small units of money from ancient China’s rope money to the paper one cent note once legal tender in Singapore. In Australia we had imperial coins that include one that was a third of the value of a penny (its was silver and called a tuppence ), the copper half penny and the gold sovereign. When we changed over in 1966 a fifty cent coin was released that actually had 55 cents of silver in each coin. Paper one dollar and two dollar notes were changed into metal hybrid coins. The waste of metals on money units worldwide was staggering. Only a cashless society will stop this wastage. Or as Ikonoclast suggested the abandonment of any money system.
But look at the last two characteristics of money from the above list. Lets take uniformity. The standardization of money has not gone well. Official units around the world have got it wrong since the time of Julius Caesar. With metal coins actual weights was an early problem. When kings and tyrants were told that issued old coins could be shaved of metal content then reissued, they jumped on board. Then criminals realized that they could make fake money and pass it on for considerable returns. Initially money was no longer standardized and few people could pick forgeries from real money.
As for limited supply well that was never going to last. Kings, conquerors, tyrants and republican governments have used their printing presses to pay for excessive lifestyles, wars, political corruption and political incompetence. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the USA printed so many US dollars to fund the Vietnam war that international inflation got out of control.
Money had failed many times as a measure of value in many countries. Just in the last one hundred years we have seen hyperinflation in Germany so bad that wheelbarrows were needed to carry enough money to buy even needs. Then there was hyperinflation in Israel so bad that ticket prices at stores had to be changed so often no one knew the price of anything. Then there was a total collapse of national currency in Argentina. This was so bad that Argentines experienced going on a weekend one Friday with one hundred thousand Pesos in their bank account only to find that on Monday morning when their bank opened for business, they only had ten thousand New Pesos. Then there was the shambles when the Euro replaced the Italian lira and the Greek Drachma. Here units of currency changed but not the prices of certain items. The price gouging was extreme.
Recently the people of Lebanon have seen their currency devalue by over 90% against the US dollar. Hedge funds regularly attack weak currencies and profit off the misery of vulnerable populations.
So Ikonoclast was again right to suggest that school based economics teaching is a farce. having taught economics to school students for 34 years I noticed three great failings. First the economic syllabus was so compromised that it was forcing teachers to teach lies about economies and the price mechanism. My own experience, after having being taught economics at school for my last two senior years, was to be seated in the UNSW Auditorium with one thousand first year Commerce faculty students and being told in my very first uni lecture that I should, in the lecturer’s words,
“Forget everything you were taught about economics at school..”
So much for school economics preparing young minds for university study of that subject.
Of course many attempts have been made to point out the failures of capitalism and neoclassical theory. Karl Marx not only named capitalism he ridiculed it brilliantly. that also is too big a topic for this page.
Guess it is time to admit defeat on my anti Teslastock prognosis. Contrary to my prognosis Tesla outperformed the automboile sector a lot. Don´t quite recall my exact conditions and time frame, either way, i was too far off to bother. This one was completly wrong.
As far as reasons go, puh… A bit tricky since the p/e ratio is so high. Still, Tesla is rather a lot more profitable at a much higher volume than i would have expect aswell. Underestimating the economies of scale advantage a new pure electric car manufactorer can achieve in the core automobile production part of it maybe.
Electric component scarcity pushed up overall car prices for a while and Tesla did handle scarcity better than other manufcatorers. But it would be unfair to blame bad luck regarding this, as this is in no way a sufficient explanation for the stock performance.
“Money had failed many times as a measure of value in many countries.” – Gregory J. McKenzie
I go further than this as do the ground-breaking theorists of Capital as Power, Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan. Money is not a measure of value at all. Money is an implementation of power. In this form, the only form it has, money measures power (of a certain type) precisely because it instantiates that power. This is the (social) power to create or destroy formations (real and social) against human resistance (real and social). In other words, people with more money can do stuff even if people with less money don’t want them to.
Money is solely about (human) power. The entirety of value theory surrounding money is fallacious. To start at the beginning:
“Numbers that exist purely as numbers and do not represent amounts of quantities are called pure numbers. Examples of pure numbers are 8, 254, 0, 21 + 5/8, 2/5 and 0.07.” [1]
When we use numbers in an attempt to refer to real things (applied mathematics) we use pure numbers with units. These are called denominate numbers.
“It is often necessary or convenient to compare two quantities. Denominate numbers are numbers together with some specified unit. If the units being compared are alike, the denominate numbers are called like denominate numbers. If units are not alike, the numbers are called unlike denominate numbers.”
“Numbers can be compared by subtraction (for example) if and only if they both are like denominate numbers or both pure numbers.” For example, we can subtract 5 meters from 8 meters and 5 dollars from 10 dollars but we cannot subtract 5 meters from 10 dollars. So far, so good, and all rather obvious of course.
However, a problem also arises when the unit is not real and/or not stable. The dollar unit is neither real nor stable. A dollar is a notional human creation. It is not fundamentally real and it is never stable (as we well know). The dollar is social-fictively real of course, raised and held up by social fictions in the laws, regulations and customs which we all maintain. The media used to record its numbers are real, but the dollar itself is not fundamentally real in the sense that a real object with mass is fundamentally real.
A founding reason why science works is that its units are stable and definable. In science we are using math operators on stable (stable enough) and defined (defined enough) units. As I say these days, refer to the SI – International System of Units. In economics, or at least in finance, we are using math operators with denominate numbers where the unit is unreal and unstable. This ipso facto renders the operations fallacious in pure science terms. The operations are nevertheless deemed valid and forced through and upon us by law, regulation and custom.
These fictions work for a time, work in some places and work for some. These fictions do not always and everywhere work for everyone. Nor do they work in the collision of the economic system with the real system, the environment. And we can see, foundationally as it were, why these fictions do not work ultimately. They do not work with real stuff. We seek to order real stuff (which actually includes humans who are also made of real stuff) with notional sums. The notional sums can never adequately and sustainably order real stuff.
The relation of this to value theory is complex. I don’t want to write too much more here. Suffice it to say that money cannot measure ethical precepts nor can it measure or compare real quantities of different types (different units). So why would we consider that money and its operations are the correct way to manage human lives and the environment? Expressed in these terms we see the fundamental absurdity of it.
I often write of “Rules” and “Laws”. In my definition “Rules” means all human legal laws, regulations and customs. “Laws” means all the fundamental laws of hard science thus far discovered in nature and elucidated in science. The thing about Rules is that they can be Fundamental Physical Laws-congruent or Fundamental Physical Laws-incongruent. If incongruent they are inoperable. We can have a capital punishment law (unwise I argue) that is operable. It is Fundamental Physical Laws-congruent. We cannot have a resurrection pardon law (except in science fiction). It would be Fundamental Physical Laws-incongruent.
There is absolute and immediate (or near-immediate) incongruence of this type and there is also asymptote or limits incongruence. That is to say a rule can operate for a while, maybe a long while in human lifespan terms, but can eventually hit an asymptote or limit. This is what has happened with the capital-finance-money system of (ultimately faux) valuation. We have hit the limit where the fictions fail. The system is fundamentally flawed and leads inevitably (axiomatically one could say) to catastrophic collapse.
It is interesting to consider the concept of “perverse instantiation”. Typically this is applied to AI. “Perverse instantiation is a type of malignant AI failure mode involving the satisfaction of an AI’s goals in ways contrary to the intentions of those who programmed it.” – EA forum.
The capitalist system itself is a case of perverse instantiation. The rules of capital (re property, money and finance) constitute a programmed set of instructions. These instructions were and executed by human agents, now also by computer agents and no doubt at the “bleeding edge” by AI agents. We are seeing the malignant failure of this system in progress in real time. While programmed to satisfy the wealth and power lusts of the oligarchs, this system is also programmed, by default and disregard, to destroy the world. We cannot save the world with this system. That is my prediction. Of course, it is an easy prediction to make now. It is one minute to midnight.
Note 1: Sentences on math concepts in quotes are from LibreTexts Mathematics.
The WTFAQ TV show last night looked into how representative of the Australian population our parliament is . The proportion of women is getting toward 50/50 pretty quickly and Aboriginal people are over represented . Disabled ,non European ,and ,lower class people are the most under represented .
Climate change is a pressing problem that needs urgent attention, and – I think we need to do alot more than just switch our power source from fossil to renewable or we are stuffed anyway .Only techno utopian longtermism devotees or nihilists can ignore this.
Funny how the Labor party is getting whacked by conservatives for doing favors for high flying (Qantas) business mates . And why did Albo go to vile shock jock Kyle Sandilands wedding ?
Hopefully the AUKUS deal wont go through congress in the USA but Kevin Rudd seems to think it will .If we keep going all the way with USA one day we might be a white, upper class ,able bodied nation left stranded in Asia .
Ikon above “We are seeing the malignant failure of this system in progress in real time.”.
Ikon, it took the DoJ 28 years to realize Google is a monolopoly and 3yrs to build a case and act. I note the delay may support your doomer prognosis. Yet they are moving.
If monopolies were broken, and interoperability was supported with laws made to OWN and KEEP OUR data and networks, the nasty capital as power pendulum would swing back towards individuals. In theory!
And Interoperability allows you, me and Gregory J. McKenzie to swap and chop providers and “walled money from you to me gardens”. Thus voting with our feet.
JQ said “Since the 1970s, excessive faith in Lesson 1 has led to a sharp movement away from public ownership, without any clear attempt to assess the balance of costs and benefits. Such a reassessment is long overdue.” (^4.)
The DoJ has finally done a reassessment. (^1. & ^3.)
^1. Market regulation – break monopolies (+DoJ ^3.)
plus
^2. Use another type of regulation available to users – Interoperability.
^1.
Bust monopolies – 3 years for DoJ to build case against Google –
“In Its First Monopoly Trial of Modern Internet Era, U.S. Sets Sights on Google
“The 10-week trial, set to begin Tuesday, amps up efforts to rein in Big Tech by targeting the core search business that turned Google into a $1.7 trillion behemoth.
…
“On Tuesday, a judge in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia will begin considering their arguments at a trial that cuts to the heart of a long-simmering question: Did today’s tech giants become dominant by breaking the law?
“The case — U.S. et al. v. Google — is the federal government’s first monopoly trial of the modern internet era, as a generation of tech companies has come to wield immense influence over commerce, information, public discourse, entertainment and labor. The trial moves the antitrust battle against those companies to a new phase, shifting from challenging their mergers and acquisitions to more deeply examining the businesses that thrust them into power.
“Such a consequential case over tech power has not unfolded since theJustice Department took Microsoft to court in 1998 for antitrust violations. ”
…
nytimes dot com
/2023/09/06/technology/modern-internet-first-monopoly-trial-us-google-dominance.html
^2.
After monopolies, break more monolopolies, then use interoperability + ownership of data, to keep them in check.
“Interoperability Can Save the Open Web
“How to free users from Big Tech’s walled gardens
MICHAEL NOLAN
05 SEP 2023
…
” .. The two benefits of competition are that it breaks the cash reserves that are used to enact public policy and it introduces the collective action problem that makes the remaining reserves harder to spend.
“How does that virtuous cycle then extend from tech into other sectors?
” Think about what happened with the breakup of Standard Oil in the first part of the 20th century. Standard Oil was not the only trust. There were trusts for everything: whiskey, railroads, iron, aluminum, cars. Standard Oil’s dominance made people so hopeless about whether or not they could have an accountable government that the toppling of Standard Oil opened up a floodgate of political will that saw all of those other trusts shattered.
“I want to go after tech because it has this characteristic interoperability that makes it a soft target. We start with tech, and that gives us the momentum, the credibility, and the political will to go after everybody else.”
https://spectrum.ieee.org/doctorow-interoperability
^3.
“Justice Department Sues Google for Monopolizing Digital Advertising Technologies
Tuesday, January 24, 2023
..
“The complaint filed today alleges a pervasive and systemic pattern of misconduct through which Google sought to consolidate market power and stave off free-market competition,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco. “In pursuit of outsized profits, Google has caused great harm to online publishers and advertisers and American consumers. This lawsuit marks an important milestone in the Department’s efforts to hold big technology companies accountable for violations of the antitrust laws.”…
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-google-monopolizing-digital-advertising-technologies
^4.
“Monopoly and Regulation: Excerpt from Two Lessons book
DECEMBER 24, 2016
JOHN QUIGGIN
…
“In the end, the choice between public ownership and regulated private monopoly involves the need to strike a balance between different opportunity costs. That balance has shifted over time, partly in response to technological changes and partly as a result of ideological shifts in thinking. Since the 1970s, excessive faith in Lesson 1 has led to a sharp movement away from public ownership, without any clear attempt to assess the balance of costs and benefits. Such a reassessment is long overdue.”
Sunshine, India won’t let that last happen without a fight.
What is the danger?
…For the biggest picture, I wonder if (ONI) they’d dare imagine climate catastrophe provoking a military invasion of Australia. If they did, they’d paint scenarios around the most likely country.
No, that wouldn’t be China. Even the Sydney Morning Herald Sinophobes don’t believe China would try to invade, only attack the US bases here…
If the ONI is any good, if it has imagination, it would have to consider what climate catastrophe might do to the world’s most populous country with growing demographic pressures and already being stretched by the current level of climate disasters, a government that has slid from democracy to anocracy, effectively a single-party state that believes the country’s dominant religion is superior and therefore regards followers of other faiths as inferior, a country that has a gender imbalance that throws up excess young males frustrated by lack of opportunity…
India is one of the countries with the bleakest climate future, its crucial rivers suffering from melting glaciers, monsoon abnormalities, heat waves and extreme floods devastating crops in a country whose population remains overwhelmingly dependent on agriculture.
As the climate crisis worsens, India is a country that could seek Lebensraum. It won’t find it in its immediate neighbours suffering similar population pressures and climate disasters.
And if populist politicians wanted to seek a scapegoat for the nation’s problems, there is that massive, largely-empty continent that is a world champion in producing fossil fuels, is one of the highest per-capita carbon consumers and has dragged the chain on international action.
It is not in Australia’s interests for India to become a bigger military power, but that is what the United States is promoting to contain China and that is what Australia is dutifully playing along with in the Quad….
thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2023/09/02/michael-pascoe-australia-china-india/
More China…
duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=kirin+9000s&ia=web
230905 FT
Teardown of Huawei’s new phone shows China’s chip breakthrough
…Dan Hutcheson, an analyst with TechInsights, told Reuters the development comes as a “slap in the face” to the U.S.
“Raimondo comes seeking to cool things down, and this chip (9000s) is [saying] ‘look what we can do, we don’t need you,'” he said.
– reuters.com/technology/teardown-huaweis-new-phone-shows-chinas-chip-breakthrough-2023-09-04/
230608 Arnaud Bertrand
The more I think about it, the more the I realize how huge this news actually is, how big a win it is for China, and how big a loss for the US.
In one simple move, China basically proved that the enormous years-long efforts the US put to destroy both Huawei and the Chinese semiconductor industry have been defeated.
In typical Chinese fashion – words are cheap in China, you prove yourself with deeds – they didn’t make any announcements about it. Huawei didn’t even communicate on the product launch, the phone just showed up in their store. And that was coincidentally on exactly the same day as the visit of US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who had vowed to “slow China’s innovation rate”. Talk about symbolism!
People had to look inside the phone to find out it is equipped with Huawei’s in-house Kirin 9000s processor, which is apparently made by Chinese semiconductor firm SMIC using a 2nd generation 7nm-class fabrication process. Less than one year ago, when the US introduced its sweeping set of sanctions against the Chinese semiconductors industry, “experts” vowed it would kill the industry or at least freeze its technological progress at the 28 nm chips China were at back then. Fast forward to now: China can evidently mass-produce 2nd generation 7nm chips entirely indigenously. The iPhone 14 Pro has 4nm chips so China is now almost on par, maybe just 1 or 2 years behind but catching up at an insane speed.
So what has the US managed to do? They’ve transformed Huawei into an incredibly more resilient company and have made China build an entirely indigenous semiconductors ecosystem, which wasn’t the case at all before the sanctions, and which I am sure will prove to be a formidable competitor to other semiconductor companies out there.
Because other countries have been paying attention here. They now know that it’s super dangerous to source semiconductors with Western firms as the US won’t hesitate to weaponize the industry for geopolitical ends. So they’ll turn to Chinese firms…
What about Huawei’s new phone? You can absolutely bet Huawei will end up eating a significant market share from Apple – as was the case before the sanctions. Especially in China where patriotic Chinese will undoubtedly rush to buy the phone, now a symbol of China’s technological might.
So it’s lose, lose, lose for the US. Much more loss than if they hadn’t done any of their aggressive actions against Huawei or China’s chip sector.
Which again goes to show just how utterly pointless this new “cold war” is. Had the US decided to remain in engagement mode instead of “extreme competition” mode (as they call it), they’d have been much better off.
In a word: hubris.
washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/02/huawei-raimondo-phone-chip-sanctions/
230608
South Korean politician urges US to abandon China chip strategy
Former Samsung executive Yang Hyang-ja warns of risk of damaging relations with Asian allies
ft.com/content/26770ab3-f71c-4f39-8569-273a12ffb7b0
twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1688210622939537408
When more is more – counting propaganda is counter propaganda. And there is much more:
Svante quoted Arnaud Bertrand who said “…. the phone just showed up in their store. And that was coincidentally on exactly the same day as the visit of US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who had vowed to “slow China’s innovation rate”. Talk about symbolism!”
More than sybolism now;
“China bans iPhone use for government work / Echoing similar moves by the US government, China has expanded bans on the use of Apple’s iPhone and other foreign smartphones for use in government buildings or work.”
https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/6/23861353/china-bans-iphones-foreign-smartphones-government-officials-us-tiktok-restrictions
Yes, KT2, and there’s word about that the big new US chip foundry projects aren’t going as projected, aren’t doing too well. Maybe that US boss admiral in Hawaii who spoke out here last year of a related big project in three years will have to reschedule their war for a bit later?
The fate of nations depends on more than one factor. China can make certain “you beaut” chips and their precursors, apparently and supposedly, ahead of and better than anyone else. Maybe they can and maybe they can’t. I will wait until James Wimberley or some other tech industry savvy person comments on this. Maybe these chips will be rapidly shown to have problems, who knows? And no doubt total surveillance of the user is the prime feature.
China will have trouble feeding its people as we go forward under rapid and catastrophic climate change, as will many other regions of the world. People can’t eat computer chips. I expect most regions of the world to face severe and likely catastrophic food shortages in the coming decade. It would be easier to enumerate those regions /areas that have some reasonable chance of continuing to feed their people. I won’t undertake either side of this exercise (again). It can sound ghoulish coming from somebody who expects to die, sooner or later, from something other than starvation.
The world is bifurcating into West and East again. The clash of civilizations thesis is being borne out. When too many civilizations get too big the world is not big enough for all of them. I am not advocating this. I am just describing it. Cultural, ideological, religious and even racist divides are too deep. The worldviews are too far apart. The competition for resources is too great. Sooner or later they are or seem to become natural enemies. Again, I am not advocating this, just describing it.
It was thought that economic progress and integration would avoid this. Not so. Progress has been unwisely and too expensively bought at the price of environmental and climate destruction. The next movements will be, I predict, the splintering into blocs and then into smaller and smaller blocs carried on against a background of net global collapse.
Very Big Ag
Your irregular fix of tech optimism this week comes in agriculture. https://cleantechnica.com/2023/09/06/ag-tech-can-cut-billions-of-tons-of-greenhouse-gas-emissions/ A broad survey by Alvaraz and Houlton of the potential for GHG mitigation in the sector comes up with nice big numbers of gigatonnes saved and sequestered, turning from a large net emitter to large net remover. They cover my favourites, enhanced rock weathering and seaweed dumping, along with biochar, agroforestry, diet changes, and fertiliser from hydrogen.
The high institutional status of the lead authors (from Princeton and Cornell), with co-authors from UC Davis, Oxford, Copenhagen, etc, is only a weak guarantee of quality in research. It is a very strong one for access to policymakers in ministries of agriculture, development banks, parliamentary committees, granting agencies, and so on, and probably supports related research proposals from scientists lower in the pecking order.
The full PLOS article is at https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0000181
JW, as distinct from ^agroforestry as defined in the PLOS article with modeled increasing and changing rainfall patterns, by 2050 or thereabouts, there is potential for plantation forestry on what are desert and arid lands now that will remain unsuitable for farming due to poor soil types, and with few if any other claims on resources. Central Western Australia is a huge case in point. I guess this won’t offset a total loss of tropical rainforests, but, well short of that it will help. Such timber plantations can be harvested for engineered timber products that ought by law lock up carbon in the built environment for many centuries.
^..Agroforestry (defined here as a natural resource management system that deliberatively integrates woody perennials (trees, shrubs, palms, bamboos, etc.) on farms and in the agricultural landscapes [38]) can increase both above and below ground C, including soil C.
..In contrast to the other CDR technologies, we implemented agroforestry as a CDR practice only on abandoned agricultural lands to avoid competition with food production. Agroforestry is only possible in locations with adequate precipitation, with potential implementation only occurring in locations that receive >1 meter of precipitation per year (which is approximately equivalent to the precipitation threshold needed for establishment of trees). We therefore assumed that agroforestry would only be implemented in locations with cropland abandonment and in locations where annual precipitation is estimated to be at least 1 meter per year under both current and projected climates in Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 4.5 and 8. 5 [33]. To avoid double-counting CDR on abandoned croplands, we do not include natural rates of GHG sequestration on abandoned agricultural lands (as described above) in the locations and scenarios where agroforestry is implemented on abandoned croplands.
…A principal barrier to technology deployment is economics, thus we describe costs associated with the climate mitigation levers we explored. Agroforestry is both the least costly and the most impactful strategy for CDR, owing to a greater potential for widespread adoption, however, it’s worth noting that trees introduce an additional complication and potential barrier to adoption in terms of land tenure, since they involve multi-year claims on resources [52,53].
JQ has said in Twitter:
“It’s time to admit that, without a radical change in strategy, the #VoiceReferendum will fail, and fail badly.
That’s unlikely to happen under Albanese (the radical strategy change). Need to start thinking about how to deal with consequences of failure. In particular, how can we pursue reconciliation.”
IMHO, Reconciliation needs:
(a) A bill of human rights in our constitution;
(b) Constitutional recognition of pre-colonial Indigenous occupation;
(c) A Treaty and then treaty recognition in the Constitution.
Yes, this a big target approach, a massive target approach. But the minimalist target approach (The Voice) has failed already (probably but let’s wait and see).
J.Q. once wrote of social policy “Give poor people money.” Or words to that effect, IIRC. I agree and I would add a point or two. First, we have to admit and cease our current policy which is “give rich and well-off people money”. Yes, that is exactly what happens. Welfare for the rich and well-off is heavily entrenched in our system.
Second, giving poor people money can be fraught in some senses. We don’t have an economy, we have a scamconomy. A proportion of poor people given money will be scammed out of it or have it tempted or inveigled out of them. This will be because they are in precarious situations, are often desperate and haven’t had the opportunity to learn how to manage money, personal budgets and other things within a highly pernicious scamconomy.
This is not an argument to not give them money. Definitely give them money to a point. But also implement policies which create a social wage in kind. I refer to free or low cost public housing, free public transport and many other things, maybe free breakfast and free lunch at disadvantaged schools and so on. In some cases there should be a free lunch! There are many things which could be done.
So how about we stop giving welfare to the rich and start giving it to the poor instead? That would be a start. This tranche would even be cost neutral to the national budget.
Re: “It’s time to admit that, without a radical change in strategy, the #VoiceReferendum will fail, and fail badly.
That’s unlikely to happen under Albanese (the radical strategy change). Need to start thinking about how to deal with consequences of failure. In particular, how can we pursue reconciliation.”
See Stephen Morris’ comments below this recent MB article. He grabbed my attention and has given me pause for thought, especially his last sentence. (NB. I’ve read and been impressed, and made to think, by a fair few of his occasional articles and comments at Independent Australia and MB. I”ll check shortly to see if he has put something up like the below.)
Voice condemns Albo
David Llewellyn-Smith
Thursday, 7 September 2023
https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2023/09/voice-condemns-albo/
Comments ..
There is an argument to be made that IF the Voice is to fail then it might be best for (almost) all concerned that it fail badly.
If the referendum fails narrowly (or is defeated in the States) then -rightly or wrongly – that will be seen as racism and an insult to First Nations peoples.
If, on the other hand, The Voice goes down in a screaming heap, stop to consider the psychology of the players. All but the most ardent supporters will wish to disassociate themselves from it. They will disown their previous support. Even ardent supporters will need to construct a narrative to rationalise the disconfirmation of their belief.
I suggest that that narrative will be:
It’s all Albanese’s fault. We should have won. It’s Albanese who mismanaged everything. His crony capitalist ties to Qantas et al poisoned the vote, etc, etc.
Such an outcome would -paradoxically – be less hurtful to First Nations peoples than a narrow defeat. In fact, the only loser would be Albanese.
A rational voter might therefore wait to see what the opinion polls are saying the day before the referendum . . . and swing accordingly. – Stephen Morris. (my emphasis)
Bring back Bill!
Ikonoclast, re: “China can make certain “you beaut” chips and their precursors, apparently and supposedly, ahead of and better than anyone else. Maybe they can and maybe they can’t. I will wait until James Wimberley or some other tech industry savvy person comments on this.”
“Follow the money…” Overnight, per CommSec, and Morningstar:
Morningstar
..The S&P 500 declined Thursday for a third consecutive trading day, dragged down by concerns about the path of interest rates and a sell off in Apple shares.
The broad index pulled back 0.3%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell 0.9%, its fourth straight negative session. The blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial was the relative outperformer, adding about 58 points, or 0.2%
..Also weighing on the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq, Apple shares continued to tumble. The stock fell 2.9%, with Apple shedding nearly $190 billion in market value over the last two days. The Wall Street Journal reported China has ordered officials at central government agencies not to use iPhones at work. Meanwhile, a new Huawei phone is gaining notice in China
..Concerns about Apple spilled over into the performance of other megacap tech stocks Thursday. Nvidia declined 1.7% and Microsoft shed 0.9%. The information-technology sector was the worst-performing segment of the S&P 500, down 1.6%
..”If Apple could be hurt by this, nobody is safe,” said Scott Ladner, chief investment officer at Horizon Investments.
CommSec Morning Report..Craig James..
European sharemarkets
..were dragged down by tech (-2%) stocks on
Thursday, with the region’s benchmark posting its
longest losing streak since February 2018, falling for a seventh
day. Semiconductor firms slid on reports that China has in recent
weeks widened existing curbs on the use of iPhones by state
employees. Apple supplier STMicroelectronics slumped 4.1%,
while BE Semiconductor, Nordic Semiconductor, ASM
International, Infineon and ASML slid between 2.6% and 6.3%.
US sharemarkets. closed mostly lower on Thursday, with the
biggest drag from Apple (-2.9%) and weakness in chip stocks over
concerns about China’s iPhone curbs, while a fall in weekly US
jobless claims fed worries about interest rates and sticky inflation.
The Philadelphia semiconductor index fell by 2% while shares of
Apple suppliers including Skyworks Solutions, Qualcomm and
Qorvo were all down more than 7%. Shares of Nvidia and
Advanced Micro Devices fell by between 1.7% and 2.5%. The
Dow Jones index rose by 57.5 points or 0.2%, outperforming the
S&P and Nasdaq because Apple ranks just 11th in the cyclicals heavy index. And the S&P 500 index slid 0.3% and the Nasdaq index shed 124 points or 0.9%.
Market movements prove nothing. They reflect sentiment not reality. They are the standard panics of capitalist irrationalism.
US vs Google.
Follow on article from KT2 says: September 7, 2023 at 10:11 am above.
– Search – little chance of winning now as too many faultering advertising metrics due to competitors and fragmentation. The DoJ need to sue via consumer protection due to the woefully unproductive search results. And cease… “paying the estimated $18 billion a year that Google pays Apple for the privilege of being the default search engine on iOS.”
– Advertising – DoJ may win.
Search on Google now is so poor, if we were ‘paying’ for it with other than our data, they’d be in court everyday due to ensh!tification.
*
“Google goes to court”
– by Casey Newton – Platformer
…
“… the government argued, Google illegally harmed competition and ensured that it maintains 80 percent market share or higher in search.
“As I wrote here back then, there’s a reasonable argument to be made that deals like these create a barrier to entry in the search market. Neeva, an upstart search engine founded by an ex-Googler that shut down earlier this year after failing to catch on, was once valued at $250 million — but never could have dreamed of paying the estimated $18 billion a year that Google pays Apple for the privilege of being the default search engine on iOS.”
…
“The bigger legal threat to Google, I believe, will come next year. That’s when the government will mount a much stronger antitrust case against the company, centered on its dominance of the digital advertising marketplace. And while AI clearly presents real business opportunities for the company, the prospect that its infinite output will overrun Google’s spam defenses means that there will be challenges as well.”
…
https://www.platformer.news/p/google-goes-to-court
“Attitudes towards capitalism in 34 countries on five continents”
Rainer Zitelmann
6 September 2023
…
“Overall, as shown in Figure 2, pro-capitalist attitudes dominate in six countries – Poland, the United States, South Korea, Japan, Nigeria, and the Czech Republic. The eight ‘neutral’ countries this time are Argentina, Sweden, Mongolia, Romania, Brazil, Nepal, Uganda, and Vietnam. Anti-capitalist attitudes dominate in a majority of surveyed countries (20), with Montenegro, Russia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Turkey bringing up the rear. Surprisingly, Switzerland belongs to this group, albeit only just.”
…
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ecaf.12591
Via “Attitudes toward capitalism (Poland fact of the day)” by Tyler Cowen
One dimension analysis. Take Nigeria eg…
“Early marriages can result in the fistula.[318]
Women face a large amount of inequalitypolitically in Nigeria, being subjugated to a bias that is sexist and reinforced by socio-cultural, economic and oppressive ways.[319]Women throughout the country were only politically emancipated in 1979.[320] Yet husbands continue to dictate the votes for many women in Nigeria, which upholds the patriarchal system.[321] Most workers in theinformal sector are women.[322] Women’s representation in government since independence from Britain is very poor. Women have been reduced to sideline roles in appointive posts throughout all levels of government and still make up a tiny minority of elected officials.[321] But nowadays with more education available to the public, Nigerian women are taking steps to have more active roles in the public, and with the help of different initiatives, more businesses are being started by women.
Under the Shari’a penal code that applies to Muslims in twelve northern states, offences such as alcohol consumption,homosexuality,[323] infidelity and theft carry harsh sentences, including amputation, lashing, stoning and long prison terms.[324]According to a 2013 survey by the Pew Research Center, 98% of Nigerians believe homosexuality should not be accepted by society.[325] In the 23 years up to September 2022, university workers in Nigeria went on strike 17 times, for a total of 57 months.[326]As a result, the 2022 summer semester was cancelled nationwide.[327]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigeria
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-candidate-for-us-president-wants-to-shrink-economy-will-declare-national-emergency-to-get-out-of-overshoot-301919130.html
Can enough US voters handle the truth?
“”Yo-yo flu”, “Spicy cough”, “The ‘rona”:
I find these clumsy attempts to normalize infection with a deadly pathogen, and somehow render it ‘friendly’, even to make it an object of affection, to be at once excruciating, pathetic and sinister.” – Dr David Berger.
This article below illustrates Dr Berger’s point, as an example of all the deluded anti-scientific thinking circulating:
https://www.smh.com.au/national/we-ve-been-constantly-sick-why-we-can-t-kick-the-yo-yo-flu-20230907-p5e2v0.html
If the reporting and quotes are accurate then the comments by the pharmacist and the doctor (the latter in a video) indicate the abysmal level of sheer ignorance being displayed by people supposedly educated in science. They are repeating all the neoliberal fallacies about the mildness of COVID-19, the value of hybrid immunity from getting infected and the (implied) impossibility of reducing infection rates by multiple measures (test, trace, isolate, mask, distance.) This normalization of the continuous decline of human health in Australia is nothing short of bizarre.
They are blind to that fact that letting an immune system disrupting pathogen circulate freely is behind all these large increases in multiple other serious infections and the inability of people’s immune systems to avoid relapses. The capitulation to propaganda and the inability to think scientifically and critically are astonishing and frankly terrifying. We are in for much worse yet.
As AJ Leonardi MMBS, PhD points out:
“The COVID19 virus has not turned into an ordinary illness. Symptoms are from the immune response and appreciated grossly (eg cough, chills, headache, fever). Pathophysiology tells a different tale of effects Cov2 has that ordinary illnesses don’t.
For example, even extreme lethal cases of flu do not send T cells into the brain. SARS Cov 2 does. See “Dysregulation of brain and choroid plexus cell types in severe COVID-19″ – Andrew C. Yang et. al.
Scientists examined T and B cell changes after infection with normal viruses versus covid. Only Covid, not the normal viruses, caused missing unactivated naive T and B cells.
Finally, chronic T cell activation differed between people who had samples taken before Cov 2 in 2019 and who had covid after 2020. Our controls post pandemic are not only dwindling, but also the infected are being subjected to chronic T cell activation issues on a widespread level.
Basically, all people living after 2020 (who have had COVID) are subject to chronic activation, whether you have “long covid” or not. So technically speaking, chronic T cell activation is normal after 2020.
Touché, and congratulations on this sweeping massive immunological achievement of durably boosted immunity.” – AJ Leonardi.
Of course, the last sentence is sarcastic. Rather than having durably boosted immunity, the majority of the human race now has chronic T cell activation, compromised and depleted immunity and chronic inflammation.
Matters will get continuously worse from here. Population level immune breakdown and ever rising excess death rates will be our future unless we take the path of COVID-19 “near eradication” (as our sole feasible path at this stage). But apparently we won’t do anything about this just as we won’t do anything about climate change. Unmitigated disaster is what we face on all fronts on our current course. A change of course is still possible but we are leaving it very, very late.
Did someone say chip factory or foundry? I got two to sell. For a mere 50% of construction costs, tsmc and Intel might also build a huge chip factory in your country, a 20 billion dollar one, tax the profits in ireland, or better not tax them there and hire a handfull of people, mainly doing low qualified and low paid work.
The chips that did slow down global automobile construction are not made in those factories by the way. Those are rather low tech.
Some things are probably worth subsidicing (or better be run by a government/international organsation as a non profit) just to have a diversified global production that can be skaled up quick, while a market only solution ends up with 1 or 2 factories for the entire worldmarket, not necessarily in the most trustworthy country (e.g. some medication components). Don´t think those cutting edge chip factories fall into that category. As far as industrial policy goes, those transplants are no use either.
“The ‘highly mutated’ COVID variant BA.2.86 — known as Pirola” — has landed in Australia – ABC News.
New variants with multiple new spike mutations just keep on coming. Pirola has 34 new mutations on its spike protein. Multiple preprint studies by reputable labs show Pirola to be “equally, or perhaps more, antibody-evasive compared to the XBB [strains].” The XBBs themselves are among the most antibody-evasive strains ever encountered.
COVID-19 is surging again in the UK. “7-day hospitalizations in England for #COVID19 in kids age 0-5 has surged—spiking up by 47% in just one week, near annual high. Kids in UK are also among the least vaccinated.” – Eric Feigl-Ding.
Of course, just about everyone is still pretending the COVID-19 pandemic is over. It is not over and it is continuously killing people and compromising their health long term. It is doing so at a rate which makes it one of the most significant infectious disease menaces to human health globally. But we continue to do nothing except to vax some of the population with a semi-effective vaccine, doing so in a rather dilatory way and taking no other significant precautions at all.
This is the same level of non-action as we show in relation to climate change. On this course we are headed for unmitigated disasters on all fronts.
On another topic, I gave up using DuckDuckGo a while ago because it or its add-ons were wrecking Firefox performance, or vice versa. I mean who knows? Not the non-techsavy user like me. Now, I am about to give up Firefox entirely. It too has become total garbage. Been doing so for quite a while actually. I’d like to use non-MS stuff but so little of it works properly any more.
Maybe the big players ensure that. There’s an old saying that an operating system, browser or search engine is not finished until its competitor’s applications don’t work on it… or with it, overlaying it or underpinning it. All part of the strategic sabotage of possibilities to ensure oligopoly profits. All part of the standard operating system of our neoliberal political economy.
Re: Ikonoclast says SEPTEMBER 21, 2023 AT 6:38 AM “..New variants with multiple new spike mutations just keep on coming.”
Was Homo sapiens’ better disease resistance a factor in displacing Neanderthal populations?
“The Italian research adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that a cluster of Neanderthal genes increases the likelihood of developing severe forms of Covid-19. A study published in the journal Nature in September 2020 first suggested that a genomic segment associated with more severe Covid-19 derived from Neanderthals, which interbred at various points with Homo sapiens before going extinct about 40,000 years ago. (…) the Neanderthal genomic segment is carried by around 16% of Europeans and 50% of people in South Asia, parts of which also had high death tolls from Covid.”
https://www.wsj.com/health/wellness/neanderthal-genes-are-linked-to-severe-covid-risk-d992ccad
https://www.wsj.com/articles/neanderthal-humans-science-alike-af653f62
If this holds then some Australian cities will again fare far worse in the next severe covid19 epidemic due to rapidly changing demographic differentials. And Alboneedy’s blind sided “looking forward” covid-19 pandemic enquiry will miss this too.
– Svante (log in troubles)