* This is an archive of my own online blog and notes, with weekly entries collected by month.
* THE WEEK THAT WAS: According to an article from REUTERS.com ("Taiwan Says Needs Long-Range Weapons To Deter China", 27 September 2021), China insists that Taiwan is part of China and will be repossessed -- by force if need be, with ongoing probes of Taiwan's defenses. Taiwanese in general are not fond of the idea, and have become less so with the heavy-handed actions of the Chinese government in Hong Kong.
In consequence, Taiwanese Defense Minister Chiu Kuocheng told Parliament that China represented a "severe threat", with the government proposing extra defense spending of about $9 billion USD over the next five years to upgrade Taiwan's defenses. Chiu said: "The development of equipment must be long range, precise, and mobile, so that the enemy can sense that we are prepared as soon as they dispatch their troops."
President Tsai Ingwen has made improving Taiwan's defenses a priority, to turn the island into a "porcupine" that would be intolerably expensive to attack. The Taiwanese are acquiring medium- and long-range missiles as a deterrent, though details are not being publicly released.
Chiu said that the priority in a Chinese attack would be Taiwan's command and communications abilities. "On this the Chinese Communists' abilities have rapidly increased. They can disrupt our command, control, communications and intelligence systems, for example with fixed radar stations certainly being attacked first. So we must be mobile, stealthy and able to change positions."
[ED: The Taiwanese, with American assistance, can pursue "asymmetric" warfare, developing missiles to deal with more expensive Chinese air and sea assets, as well as striking deep into China if need be. Might we see a drive for a regional defense alliance along China's Pacific perimeter? Might we even see a Taiwanese unilateral declaration of independence? If so, how would that work out?]
* As much as people love to hate Amazon.com, as discussed in an article from The Motley Fool ("Amazon Is Winning the Battle for Workers" by Parkev Tatevosian, FOOL.com, 27 September 2021), the company is effective. The global COVID-19 pandemic has led to a worker shortage, caused by the pandemic and knock-on factors, such as the need to stay home to care for kids or elders. While the pandemic continues, thanks to vaccination and vaccine mandates, people are returning to jobs -- if not fast enough to keep up with current demand.
Amazon, however, is winning the employment battle, having hired a staggering 450,000 workers since the beginning of the pandemic. Partly its boom was a direct result of the pandemic, since online sales were on a roll with people stuck in lockdowns -- while it wasn't in lockdown itself, being generally able to keep the pandemic under control at its facilities. Amazon sales in fiscal 2020 were 37.6% higher than fiscal 2019, with revenue surging from $280 billion USD to $386 billion USD.
More business meant more hiring. With people put out of work elsewhere, there was no shortage of people wanting to sign on. The company also courted them, offering to pay workers' college tuition, while giving higher hourly wages, sign-on bonuses, and other enticements. Amazon's offer to pay employees' college tuition came after rivals Walmart and Target made the same announcement. On the face of it, it sounds benign, and it is, but of course it reflects a practical agenda: the companies can benefit because a college degree takes several years to complete, potentially keeping the employee with the company in the meantime.
On 14 September, Amazon announced it wanted to hire 125,000 employees in the USA at an average starting pay of $18 USD per hour, reaching as high as $22.50 USD per hour in some locations. Amazon also offers sign-on bonuses of up to $3,000 USD in some locations, plus qualifying employees receive health benefits from the first day of hire. Most of these jobs will be as warehouse employees at fulfillment centers -- entry-level positions requiring little skill, but highly regimented and not particularly exciting. With good pay, hundreds of thousands of new workers still think Amazon is offering them a good deal, and retaining workers is not such a problem.
* As discussed in an article from REUTERS.com ("Explainer: How US Regulators Are Cracking Down On Cryptocurrencies" by Michelle Price, 24 September 2021), while Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies seemed at one time like a greedy fad that would, like other economic bubbles of the past, quickly collapse and go away -- thanks to the internet, they appear to be going from strength to strength, with a market now valued in trillions of dollars. Governments are suspicious of cryptocurrencies, suspicious enough to start cracking down on them. China has now banned all crypto trading and mining, sending the crypto markets tumbling.
Global financial regulators worry that the rising tide of privately operated currencies could undermine state control of the financial and monetary systems, increase risk to the financial system, promote financial crime, and cheat investors. The USA has not banned cryptocurrencies yet, but President Joe Biden's regulators have formed up to consider the issue, the players including:
* Kareem Abdul-Jabbar -- a towering National Basketball Association superstar in his prime, with a strong scholarly and literary bent -- finally got fed up enough with antivaxxer lunacy to pen a particularly eloquent and pointed essay titled "Why Athletes Need to Lead the Drive to Vaccinate", suggesting that the antivaxxers in the sports domain need to be leashed in. It is worth posting an edited-down version here:
QUOTE:
A couple of years ago, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world the way the Chicxulub meteor collided with the Earth 66 million years ago, wiping out 75% of plant and animal life, including dinosaurs. If it were up to those contemporary dinosaurs refusing to get vaccines or denying the seriousness of the global pandemic, we'd lumber toward extinction like the previous custodians of the Earth.
Despite my decades of fighting the kind of voluntary ignorance that allows racism to still have such a stranglehold on our country, I've maintained a cautious optimism about people. I believe when given the opportunity most want to do the right thing. But that optimism has been greatly tested these past few months as I see so many people refusing to protect their families, their communities, and their country.
Let's start with these facts: 4.55 million people in the world have died from COVID-19, 688,000 of them in the USA. So far, more than 42 million Americans have been diagnosed with COVID-19, with about 120,000 more new cases each day. COVID-19 has changed how we live, how we work, how we play, how we interact with family and friends. It has pummeled the economy with daily body blows, some of them below the belt.
And yet, we rise. We rise because we have the intellectual ability to learn from the past, and we have the instinctual drive to protect our children and preserve humanity. The world has faced the cruelty of pandemics in the past. Each time we study, we analyze, we devise solutions. We do this through science. And each time, science has to fight the ignorance of the people it is trying to save as vigorously as it fights the diseases killing them. It's like diving into the lake to save a drowning man who refuses to take off his ankle weights. Worse, he's holding onto his children while he's sinking.
And yet, we rise. We rise because we refuse to let that man drown, even if it's his fault. Even if he wants to. Which is why it's so shocking and disappointing to see so many people, especially people of color, treat the vaccination like it's just a matter of personal preference, like ordering no onions on your burger at a drive-thru. While I can understand the vaccine hesitancy of those who have been historically marginalized and even abused by the health care system, enough scientific documentation has been given to the public to set that past behind us for now.
Athletes and other celebrities have a public platform to help alleviate this crisis and to save lives. To not take on that responsibility harms the sports and entertainment industries, the community, and the country. Those who claim they need to do "more research" are simply announcing they have done no research, because the overwhelming consensus of immunologists and other medical experts is that the vaccine is effective and safe. This position only perpetuates the stereotype of the dumb jock who's only in sports for the money. It dehumanizes the victims as nothing more than political fodder.
The anti-expert stance that anti-vaxxers take reveals the fuzziest of thinking. Everyone expects scientists to solve all of our main problems: global warming, cancer, Alzheimer's, ETC -- unless these same experts tell us we have to actually do something to help fix the problems. Then we stop trusting them. But I assure you that when an athlete has a broken leg or heart attack or their child is in an accident, they don't say to the doctors: "Don't do anything until I do more research." They beg the medical experts to help.
The dark reality is that those who promote hesitancy and "more research" have blood on their hands. Worse, the kind of conspiracy theories and pseudoscience pundits spread is the kind of selective "science" that white people used to justify enslaving black people. Racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia all thrive in the addled minds of flat-Earth thinking. For Black athletes or entertainers to give this same anti-vax pseudo-science any oxygen is to allow the other crackpot theories to co-exist that justify marginalizing others.
If individual athletes can't muster the courage to do the right thing, then the NBA and every other league governing body must step in and mandate vaccinations for players, coaches, and staff in order to protect the team, the fans, and the community. Players are free to choose not to get vaccinated, but they should have the courage of their moral convictions to sit out the season, sustained in the righteousness of their choice. They've already proven they are not team players.
We must all step up to help each other, not just because it's practical for our survival, but because it's a shared value that enriches us. Isaac Hayes said it straight in his SHAFT theme: "Who's the cat that won't cop out when there's danger all about?" We can place no trust in those who tell us there is no danger. We rise.
END_QUOTE
Vaccine mandates are spreading in the USA, but not fast enough. One can hope that by the end of October, they will be comprehensive, and Americans -- like it or not -- will act like grown-ups and get their vaccinations.
* Transport gliders were used in a big way in World War II. They left something to be desired -- they were murderously dangerous troop transports -- and went out of fashion after the conflict, with the introduction of helicopters and tactical transports.
Over the last decade, there has been interest in reviving the transport glider. Now the US Air Force has awarded a contract to the Silent Arrow company to develop a production expendable cargo glider, scaled down from the company's "GD-2000 (Glider, Disposable, 2000 pounds / 900 kilograms)" to the "GD-1600" configuration -- of course, scaled down by 20%.
The Silent Arrow glider looks like a long shipping crate with a tailcone / tailfin and blunt nose cone attached. It has tandem "switchblade" pop-out wings and GPS-INS guidance. It has a glide ratio of over 8:1 -- that is, drop it from an altitude of 3 kilometers, it will be able to glide to a target over 24 kilometers away.
The glider was designed for both military and humanitarian assistance use. Silent Arrow makes a 360-kilogram (800-pound) model, but that was too small for the Air Force. The GD-2000 was, however, too big to fit through the door of a CV-22 Osprey special-operations tiltrotor, so the USAF specified the GD-1600 configuration.
Silent Arrow says the GD-1600 will only cost half as much as the JPADS steerable cargo parachute system, while having several times the range. It appears that the current contract only covers development, with production to be ordered following. Silent Arrow also makes an electrically-powered, reusable version of the delivery system.
* There's been a lot of interest in electric and hybrid-electric flying machines as of late. As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("Regent To build High-Speed Electric Ground-Effect Seagliders" by Loz Blain, 11 May 2021), the Regent company of Boston is now working on an electric "wing in ground effect (WIG)" AKA "sea skimmer" vehicle.
The Regent sea skimmer -- the company calls it a "seaglider" -- looks like a seaplane, with a tee tail and a strut-braced gull wing featuring eight electric motors. It has hydrofoils to help get it up to speed and "unstick" from the water; once airborne, it flies at a height of a few meters, obtaining much of its lift from the air cushion between the wings and the sea surface. It will fly at 290 KPH (180 MPH), which is definitely speedy when flying at such low altitude, and will be much more efficient than an aircraft. It can operate from ordinary docks. The company is talking about a 12-passenger vehicle initially.
There's nothing new about sea skimmers, but they've never amounted to much commercially. They don't handle rough seas well, so they're mostly useful for protected waterways and coastal regions. The Soviets experimented with them a great deal, even building a giant jet-powered sea skimmer known as the "Caspian Sea Monster" -- but for the most part, they're small machines, often homebuilt or made by small firms. Wigetworks of Singapore is flying the "Airfish-8", which is already up and running. Regent faces no particular technical challenge in building its electric sea skimmer, and is getting financial backing; the question is whether there is enough customer interest to fund development.
BACK_TO_TOP* THE WEEK THAT WAS: As discussed in an article from NBCNEWS.com ("China Tries To Wear Down Its Neighbors With Pressure Tactics" by Dan De Luce, 10 April 2021), China is flexing its military muscle, attempting to assert territorial claims in the region by using pressure tactics designed to push its territorial claims, employing military aircraft, militia boats and sand dredgers to dominate access to disputed areas. Shots are not being fired, but Chinese actions are meant to intimidate, with intrusions of Chinese combat aircraft into Taiwan airspace becoming regular occurrences.
Taiwan has a modern air force, but it is much smaller than China's, and the intrusions have worn down pilots and aircraft. The Taiwanese have become less inclined to send up fighter aircraft, instead "painting" the intruders with radars controlling surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries.
The same approach is evident in the South China Sea and the East China Sea, with Taiwan, the Philippines and other governments struggling to fend off China's numerous maritime militia boats, coast guard vessels, and navy vessels ships venturing into disputed territory. A senior US defense official said the Chinese are "trying to grind them down."
Off the coast of the Philippines, for example, a flotilla of Chinese maritime militia have taken up station around the disputed Whitsun Reef in the Spratly Islands, ignoring demands to leave. By refusing to budge, the large group of boats is effectively controlling access to a wider area that lies inside the Philippines' exclusive economic zone.
The Philippines are greatly outgunned by Chinese military power, but Manila has tried to rally international support against Beijing's presence, and leveraged on its relationship with Washington DC. The White House has responded repeatedly, one State Department spokesman saying: "As we have stated before, an armed attack against the Philippines armed forces, public vessels, or aircraft in the Pacific, including in the South China Sea, will trigger our obligations under the U.S.-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty."
Vietnam is similarly being squeezed by China's creation of islands with bases in the South China Sea, implying a threat against maritime access to Vietnam's ports. That clearly rankles the Vietnamese, who have a long history of friction with China. Both sides remember that when they last clashed, in 1979, the Chinese got the worst of it -- which led China to modernize its forces. The Chinese are almost daring the Vietnamese to take action.
The US Navy has established a high profile in the region, with movements of submarines and a carrier task force. After high-level discussions with the US, the Chinese have cut back on air intrusions against Taiwan for the moment. On 9 October, Chinese President Xi Jinping denounced Taiwan's inclinations towards separatism, though he said that China would seek "peaceful means" of reunification -- which recent experience suggests means "all measures short of outright war." The Chinese promise of "one country, two systems" rings hollow, because they've said the same thing about Hong Kong, the oppression there suggesting Beijing really wants "one country, our system".
The Taiwanese understand that, with Taiwanese President Tsai Ingwen rejecting Chinese "coercion", asserting Taiwanese sovereignty and democracy, and pledging a defensive buildup. Tsai said that Taiwan will not "act rashly", then added:
QUOTE:
But there should be absolutely no illusions that the Taiwanese people will bow to pressure. We will continue to bolster our national defense and demonstrate our determination to defend ourselves in order to ensure that nobody can force Taiwan to take the path China has laid out for us. This is because the path that China has laid out offers neither a free and democratic way of life for Taiwan, nor sovereignty for our 23 million people.
END_QUOTE
Beijing issued an irritated statement in response: "This speech advocated Taiwan independence, incited confrontation, cut apart history, and distorted facts." It is difficult to see that China will back down on Taiwan, but continuing on course will mean further escalation.
* On Monday, 4 October, Facebook and its system of apps were knocked offline for six hours. The rest of the week wasn't much better for the firm; the next day, a whistleblower named Frances Haugen who had worked for Facebook testified to Congress about the diseased company culture there -- saying that Facebook harms children, sows division, and undermines democracy in pursuit of breakneck growth and "astronomical profits."
Haugen told Congress that Facebook consistently chose to maximize growth instead of implementing safeguards, while it kept to itself internal research that illuminated the harms of Facebook products: "The result has been more division, more harm, more lies, more threats and more combat. In some cases, this dangerous online talk has led to actual violence that harms and even kills people."
Before Haugen left Facebook, she copied thousands of pages of confidential documents and shared them with lawmakers, regulators, and THE WALL STREET JOURNAL -- with the WSJ publishing a series of reports titled THE FACEBOOK FILES. Her testimony to Congress was highly credible, since she was obviously intelligent, articulate, professional, and organized. She claimed that Facebook was never forthright when outsiders tried to probe the company: "Facebook chooses to mislead and misdirect. Facebook has not earned our blind faith."
Haugen urged lawmakers to examine the algorithms that drive popular features, like the main feeds in Facebook and Instagram. The algorithms reward engagement: comments, "likes" and other interactions, it is spread more widely and is featured more prominently in feeds. The engagement-based formula is biased towards the distribution of rage, hate, or disinformation, Haugen, however, was against breaking up Facebook -- since the separated components would work as a network that would maintain the status quo.
The anger against Facebook is often incoherent. Both Democrat and Republican politicians blast it, but they are short on realistic solutions, and sometimes work at cross purposes: Democrats, for example, would like to suppress trolls such as antivaxxers, while Republicans insist that there should be no "censorship" of even the most toxic trolls. In addition, many of Facebook's problems are those of the internet in general, particularly trolling and "fake news". Certainly, its share price doesn't seem to be hurting much, undergoing healthy growth.
However, Facebook may be nearing the point of no return, becoming a corporate pariah like big tobacco, faced with slow decline in all respects. Possibly some minor tweaks in company culture is all that's needed to turn Facebook around. One aspect of that might be to get a new public face: CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried to respond to fury this last week with reasoned statements, only to meet a wave of contempt and ridicule. Possibly it's undeserved, but Amazon's Jeff Bezos has recently kicked himself upstairs, to leave management of the company in less controversial hands. Zuckerberg could think it a liberation to do the same for himself.
* I inherited a set of Individual Retirement Accounts (IRA) from my father, one of them with Wells Fargo. Every year, I have to take a Required Minimum Distribution (RMD) from the inherited IRAs, or have problems with the taxman. This year, I asked for some changes to the way Wells Fargo handled the IRA RMD; communications didn't go well, and things got totally broken.
That's all neither here nor there, but to fix things I was emailed a form in PDF format to get the RMD straight again. I was to fill out the form and either fax or mail it back. My first question in consideration of the exercise was: Do I need to print this thing out, or can I fill it out digitally on my PC? With the answer: Why would I print it out if I didn't have to?
It wasn't convenient to edit the form in PDF format, but after puzzling things over, I figured there was likely a free online conversion utility to get the form into PNG files that I could handle in a paint program. A little searching led me to ONLINE2PDF.com, with a web page that made the conversion easy.
Filling out the form with a paint program was generally straightforward, except for adding my hand-written signature. I already had a scanned image of my signature, but it was small and cluttered; I scaled in up considerably, redrew it, and screened out the clutter to come up with a nice signature that I could paste into the form. I needed to attach a voided check to authorize direct bank deposit of the RMD, but I also already had a scan of that, so I just pasted that into the form, too.
While I was doing all this, I was thinking I would fax the files back to Wells Fargo instead of mailing them -- but I don't have a fax modem. I got to wondering if there was some way to email to a fax machine; more searching indicated there was, but it required emailing to an online fax service to get it done.
As it turns out, there's a confusing number of online fax services. They generally have "free" offerings, but of course they came with restrictions, and none could handle the five-page form I had for free. I finally settled on FAXZERO.com, which allowed me to send a fax for $2.09 USD, paid via Paypal. I could've sent the pages still in PNG format, but I figured it was more convenient to use PDF, so I used ONLINE2PDF.com to convert back again. I handed FAXZERO.com the PDF file, paid my $2.09 USD, with FAXZERO.com emailing me a few minutes later that the fax had been delivered.
It was fun figuring out workarounds to get around handling paper, though this was primitive: really, shouldn't we be able to do all of this sort of paperwork online? Sure, it will need robust multifactor ID -- but that's coming, possibly in the not-too-distant future. Anyway, in a few days I'll call up Wells Fargo again and see if I've got everything straight. I've had enough hassles with the company as of late that I'm not sure it will be. Hey, ya'll want I should sic Liz Warren on ya?
On the positive side, on getting into my Wells Fargo online account -- I never had before, and getting a login was a bit dodgy -- I found out that I had been underestimating the size of the IRA in their hands by about $10K USD. It was a little like finding $10K USD I'd left in a coat pocket. I can't complain.
* As another petty item, I'd been wanting to figure out some way of attaching a hand strap to my Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra camera phone. Since I use it as a camera, my handling of it is riskier than with my other phones, with the attendant chance of dropping it into a hole or to be damaged. I don't want to do that with a thousand-dollar smartphone.
I found a ten-buck smartphone strap kit on Amazon.com and decided to give it a try. It turned out to be simplicity itself: there was a plastic pad I slipped inside the phone's armor case, the pad having a nylon strap with an eyelet ring that went out the USB socket hole. I had to clip off the little awkward "door" in the armor case over the socket hole, but I didn't like it anyway, so no loss. I could then clip on the hand or neck straps provided with the kit. I got three pads, so I could fix up some of my other phones as well. The only trouble in the exercise was getting the armor case off the phone -- it's a tight fit -- but otherwise I am happy with the fix.
* As discussed in an article from CNN.com ("Why You Could See Subtle Changes To Your Smartphone's Design" by Samantha Murphy Kelly, 5 August 2021), new generations of smartphones are always emerging. The upcoming generation of smartphones may have an enhancement not noticeable at first sight: a "right to repair (RTR)".
Companies, notably Apple, have been criticized for using schemes to discourage repair of their products -- such as using non-removable memory or batteries, or sealing devices with special glue. The companies, of course, argue that they only want to make sure products are properly repaired.
The Federal government isn't buying it. In July 2021, US President Joe Biden asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to set RTR rules preventing manufacturers from imposing restrictions on independent device repair shops and DIY repairs. New regulation would prohibit such practices and require smartphone manufacturers to make parts, tools, repair manuals, and diagnostics for out-of-warranty repairs more readily available to third-party businesses. Pedro Pacheco, a senior director at market research firm Gartner, says:
QUOTE:
In many cases, the price to fix a smartphone or computer is close to, if not more than, replacing it all together -- a strategy that encourages people to buy new devices rather than fixing them. This needs to change. Manufacturers will need to make design choices to keep the cost down to repair devices.
END_QUOTE
The FTC, which has been substantially empowered in the new era, replied that the agency would "root out" unfair repair restrictions on phones, fridges, tractors, and other product. This push has also gained traction among regulators in Europe.
Along similar lines, European regulators are now pressing for all smartphones and other gadgets to use the USB-C data / recharging connector -- much to the distress of Apple, which doesn't want to lose the control that its Lightning connector buys it. The regulation hasn't been passed yet, and won't be until 2024.
BACK_TO_TOP* THE WEEK THAT WAS: As discussed in an article from REUTERS.com ("Analysis: Inflation Revival Is A Victory, Not A Defeat, For Central Banks" by Balazs Koranyi, 13 October 2021), there's been much concern over inflation as of late -- but it appears that central bankers are actually welcoming it. Central banks are always walking a fine line between inflation and deflation, with the "sweet spot" leaning towards mild inflation.
Through the massive government spending of the past few years, central bankers believe they're getting closer to the sweet spot. While Japan remains in the low-inflation doldrums, the current rise in price pressures should allow central banks to scale down easy-money policies and not have to worry about the global economy staying afloat. The current inflation rise does present risk, but the comparisons with 1970s-style stagflation -- in which prices and unemployment rose together, along with little or no growth -- are exaggerated.
Current inflation rates do look troublesome. Price growth is already over 5% in the United States and could soon reach 4% in the euro zone, well more than central bankers like, and at levels not seen in over a decade. However, policymakers see this as largely a temporary surge caused by the global economy's bumpy post-pandemic reopening. European Central Bank (ECB) board member Isabel Schnabel said: "The current inflationary spike can be compared to a sneeze: the economy's reaction to dust being kicked up in the wake of the pandemic and the ensuing recovery."
The transient high inflation will fade, though it is likely to settle back at a higher level than was the case before the pandemic. Central bankers like that idea, one saying anonymously: "These are the perfect conditions, this is what we worked for." Central banks were leery of raising interest rates, but that's what's happening in a number of countries -- including Norway, South Korea, and Hungary -- while the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, and the ECB have made clear that a move is coming.
Stagflation? Probably not. Wage rises, a precondition of inflation, remain anemic in Europe, and are holding below the inflation rate in the United States -- the push for a higher minimum wage in the USA doesn't appear troublesome. Labor unions have become weak, and to the extent they retain power, they are also concerns other than wages, such as leisure time and job security. Labor activism is unlikely to result in a wage-price spiral, as it did in the 1970s.
Zooming energy prices are also unlikely to cause much damage, since energy's share in overall expenditure has dropped over recent decades -- US economic output for each unit of energy has more than doubled since 1975 -- and the world has plenty of experience in managing life with oil prices above $80 USD a barrel. Economist Carsten Brzeski of ING, a multinational financial services company, says:
QUOTE:
Economies have become much less dependent on energy, both in terms of private consumption and in industrial production. Any increase in energy prices, as unwelcome as it is for producers, consumers and central bankers, does not have the same economic impact as it did in the '70s.
END_QUOTE
Central banks are keeping careful track of the shifts in direction of the global economy. Most of them were given more independence because of the inflation in the 1970s, and they are entirely alert to the dangers of surging inflation. French central bank Governor Francois Villeroy de Galhau says: "We should be vigilant without being feverish,"
Few are also saying that the current high inflation has to be temporary. Atlanta Fed President Rafael Bostic says: "Indicators do not suggest that long-run inflation expectations are dangerously untethered -- but the episodic pressures could grind on long enough to unanchor expectations." As with so much else in economics, there's an emotional factor involved: how long is too long?
Central banks also have to struggle with the huge debts run up by governments during the pandemic. US debt is around 133% of gross domestic product, while in the euro zone the level is around 100% -- both up from the mid-70% range just over a decade ago. Japanese debt is over 250% of GDP. Central banks have been keeping interest rates low to ensure that the debt is manageable, central banks may be forced to choose between living with higher inflation or higher borrowing costs that choke growth. Slovak central bank chief Peter Kazimir says: "At the moment we're the finance ministers' best friends, but that's not going to last forever."
* One Nick Carmody -- a psychotherapist with a law degree, out of Denver -- wrote a set of tweets on the mindset of the Trump movement, which is worth repeating in a criminally edited form here:
QUOTE:
The "brilliance" of white nationalist Steve Bannon -- arguably the most significant of Donald Trump's "enablers" -- is that he has convinced tens of millions of people to believe that destroying democracy is a noble and patriotic objective, as long as it occurs while chanting "America First".
I've been reluctant to use the word "cult" terminology to describe Trumpism, since it's a cliche that tends to trivialize the behavior. However, it's getting ever harder to avoid the word. In the era after the Trump presidency, Trumpism seems to be settling into two overlapping but identifiable wings of an authoritarian movement.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about an anti-mask school board protest. After watching the video, I observed how the protest felt like a tailgate party with "casual fans" who barely know anything about football, but were there for camaraderie and to "belong". The post-Trump movement is not fully about Trump anymore. Trump is a cartoon figure, a symbol of white grievance. He was the right person at the right time to step up to the role; now he's a figurehead, a mascot, for the larger authoritarian populist movement. He doesn't run it; he doesn't run anything, he has no capability of doing so.
There is also a second group of supporters, fans, who only care about Trump to the extent that he furthers their political agenda. They don't think highly of him, and they don't think highly of the "superfans" who idolize him -- even as they condemn the Left for sneering at the superfans as "deplorables". The "serious" political wing of Trumpism excuses his depraved behavior because he has "good policies". The political Trumpists typically still publicly root for Trump, even though they don't care about him; they bought the ticket, they're staying on the ride.
The political Trumpists are actually taking their cue not from Trump but from Steve Bannon, since he articulates their insensible, undemocratic, unpatriotic impulses. I recently had a conversation with someone who is a lifelong Republican, has a military background, and as recently as 2019 was aggressively disputing that income gap disparity was larger than any point in the 50+ years of tracking that information. This was as a "chamber-of-commerce Republican", pro-capitalism defense of Trump's 2017 corporate tax cuts. In a later argument, I was accused of being anti-corporation -- an implicit accusation that I was an anti-capitalism, pro-socialism liberal.
His mindset reflects the toxic effect that Steve Bannon and FOX's Tucker Carlson have on US society:
-- and Carlson fawning over Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban. My acquaintance said he had been "activated" by Bannon. In earlier conversations, he had defended the white-nationalist Proud Boys -- though, in the wake of the Capitol riot, he muted that, simply endorsing taking on "antifa terrorists". He still went on to praise Viktor Orban, it appears taking the cue from Carlson.
His mindset was that of an "authoritarian follower". Studies suggest that such followers make up as much as a third of any population, though under normal circumstances they're not so noticeable. When an authoritarian comes along, they are indeed "activated", having been roused out of passivity to assert beliefs that they previously kept under wraps. Having got a fix, they become addicts, justifying their addiction, quick to jump on to the most preposterous conspiracy theories in support.
Bannon has not only effectively branded an anarchistic attempt to destroy America as "America First", he's amassed and potentially "activated" millions of followers. The Capitol Riot was evidence of this. America First is unpatriotic, a new Secessionism, even less credible than the original. It is anti-democracy, with contempt for fair elections, and a willingness to cross any line to win. It is against the rule of law, taking on law enforcement officers and judges who stand in the way; despite its invocations of the Constitution, it is contemptuous of its actual principles. It is, to an extent and peculiarly, even anti-capitalist, insisting that businesses have no right to impose any limits on the Trumpist mass.
Confronted with a pandemic that has killed over 700,000 Americans, America First stands rigidly against public safety and personal responsibility. It's a perfect storm of emotional immaturity, arrested development, and the idolization of "freedom" to the point where the "right to ignorance" and the "freedom" to put others at risk is equated with "liberty". It is, unfortunately, a path whose only real goal is national destruction -- an anarchism that doesn't even pretend to consider the new order that is to follow. Its incoherence suggests it has no long-term future, but how much damage will it do before it goes away?
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* US President Joe Biden is pushing an ambitious "green" agenda, one facet being a push towards solar power, with the US Department of Energy (DOE) released in September 2021 declaring that solar power could generate up to 45% of the US electricity supply by 2050, compared to less than 4% today.
According to a commentary by Joshua D. Rhodes, Research Associate, University of Texas at Austin ("Biden's Proposed Tenfold Increase In Solar Power Would Remake The US Electricity System"), the "Solar Futures Study (SFS)" considered the energy status quo, with its reliance on fossil fuels, and rejected it as a nonstarter in the face of climate change. The only option then is decarbonization -- meaning a shift to low-carbon and carbon-free energy sources, with an update of the electrical grid to support renewable energy.
The renewable approach would demand about 1,050 to 1,570 gigawatts (GW) of solar power in 2050, which would meet about 45% of electricity demand. For perspective, a gigawatt of generating capacity is equivalent to about 3.1 million solar panels or 364 large-scale wind turbines. The remainder would come from wind, nuclear, hydropower, biofuel, geothermal, and combustion turbines run on zero-carbon synthetic fuels such as hydrogen. Energy storage capacity would grow at about the same rate as solar.
Solar is the most attractive renewable energy source because it has achieved low costs, and most of the USA has lots of sunshine. Wind, hydropower and geothermal resources aren't so evenly distributed. To be sure, it would make sense to develop, say, wind power in regions where wind is persistent -- but distributing that power from those regions would mean building more high-voltage transmission lines.
The SFS estimates that producing 45% of America's electricity from solar power by 2050 would require deploying about 1,600 GW of solar generation -- contrasted with the 103 GW of solar power capacity today, with the current grid providing 1,200 GW of electricity. The report envisions most of the solar power generated by large utility installations, with about 10% to 20% generated directly by residences, businesses, and other facilities.
Incidentally, while the report believes most of the utility-scale installations will use solar panels, it also asserted there would be a place for solar-thermal turbogenerator power. However, solar panels have become so cheap that solar-thermal does not appear to be competitive any more. In any case, the required capacity would demand solar panels over an area of roughly 44,000 square kilometers (17,000 square miles) -- about the same area as the states of Massachusetts and New Jersey combined, though that would still only be about half a percent of America's land mass. Such a large-scale installation would demand a long-term political commitment, as well as an adequate supply of solar panels. Improvements in efficiency would reduce the area required.
The SFS also states that the US will have to expand its electric transmission capacity by 60% to 90% to support the levels of solar deployment that it envisions. Building long-distance transmission lines is politically troublesome, especially when they cross state lines, and the Federal government would need to set up an expedited authority to get it done. One possible solution is gaining traction: building transmission lines along existing rights of way next to highways and railroad lines, which avoids the need to secure agreement from numerous private landowners.
Moving to a grid dominated by renewables will require utilities and energy regulators to rethink the old way of matching supply and demand. The future grid will require more power transmission and energy storage, along with "smart power" usage in which customers shift the times when they use power to periods when it's most abundant and affordable. It also will demand better coordination between North America's regional power grids, which aren't well configured now for moving electricity seamlessly over long distances.
In 2020, natural gas, coal and oil provide about 80% of primary energy input to the US economy, including electric power generation. That proportion is persistently falling, but it still means replacement of a massive amount of infrastructure. Resistance to change is not going to disappear. The Biden Administration plans to use the Clean Electricity Payment Program, a provision in the multi-trillion budget plan pending in Congress, to create incentives for electric utilities to generate more power from carbon-free sources.
BACK_TO_TOP* THE WEEK THAT WAS: As discussed in an article from ECONOMIST.com ("The Taliban Find Themselves On The Wrong Side Of An Insurgency" 23 October 2021), the new Taliban regime in Afghanistan has, to no surprise, not got off on a good foot. On 15 October 2021, a suicide attack on a Shiite mosque in Kandahar left at least 40 dead; a week earlier, a similar attack on a Shiite mosque in Kunduz Province killed at least 50. Responsibility for both bombings was claimed by the Afghan branch of Islamic State (IS), known as "Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP)".
For the time being, ISKP is the Taliban's biggest security threat. The mosque bombings have been accompanied by assassinations of Taliban fighters. Patrols have been ambushed, and fighters kidnapped and beheaded. ISKP dates back to about 2014, when Islamic extremists began to think the Taliban was too moderate -- grievances being the Taliban refusal to attack withdrawing foreign forces, and their tolerance for Shiites. They gained ground in Afghanistan's eastern provinces for a time, but were then generally suppressed by the Taliban.
When the government of Ashraf Ghani, the former president, collapsed in August, hundreds of jailed ISKP fighters escaped from prison. Bolstered by these reinforcements, the group switched from trying to hold rural territory to waging an urban terrorist campaign. David Petraeus -- a former director of the CIA, who also led international troops in Afghanistan from 2010 to 2011 -- recently told British MPs, with obvious satisfaction, that the Taliban were "becoming acquainted with how much more challenging it is to be a counter-insurgency force than it is to be insurgents and hang out in the hills."
The Taliban's message, as they came into power, was that they would bring peace to Afghanistan. They haven't; nobody believes their claims that ISKP isn't a big threat, that they are under control. Iran's president, Ebrahim Raisi, demanded that the Taliban do more, saying on 18 October: "They should know if they do not deal with Daesh [IS] seriously and if Daesh is not destroyed in the region, this will pave the way for the harassment of many other countries and people in the region." The Iranians are, of course, very concerned about attacks on Shiites, suggesting that Iran will help the Taliban in taking ISKP down.
The Taliban say they have been breaking up ISKP cells, with reports of clerics associated with the militants being killed, and of sympathizers being rounded up. However, the Taliban is at heart a brute-force operation, and brute force has a tendency to be counterproductive in suppressing insurgencies.
ISKP is so extreme that it doesn't have wide support. However, the Taliban is rooted in the Pushtun tribal group, and though the largest such group in Afghanistan, at 42% of the population it's still outnumbered by other Afghans. If resistance from other factions becomes widespread, Afghanistan will descend into civil war, with chaos becoming the norm.
* There's been endless fussing in Congress over big issues as of late, but though matters seem to be heading in the right direction, it's taking a lot of time, and nothing's very clear yet. The one thing that did cut through the noise was the conviction of Lev Parnas -- a Florida businessman of Ukrainian origins -- on six counts related to "influence buying" campaign finance schemes. Parnas and his co-conspirators used a Russian backer's money to fund political contributions they hoped to trade for political favor for their budding joint cannabis venture.
It took the Federal jury in US District Court in Manhattan less than a day to decide that Parnas committed fraud through donations to several state and Federal candidates that were funded by a Russian tycoon. Parnas was also found guilty on counts related to a $325,000 USD donation in 2018 to a fundraising committee that supported then-President Donald Trump. Parnas is facing a second trial on separate fraud charges, and won't be sentenced until that trial is over.
The significance of the Parnas case is that he is intimately tied to Trump henchman Rudy Giuliani, having worked with Giuliani to find damaging information on Joe Biden and his son Hunter before the 2020 election. Parnas and Igor Fruman, a co-defendant, were arrested on the campaign-finance charges in October 2019, not long after news broke of a phone call in which Trump pressured the president of Ukraine to start a Biden investigation.
Giuliani is under investigation himself. Exactly how the Parnas case links to his, and to the investigations of Trump and company, is not clear; what is clear from the conviction is that the usually and necessarily invisible legal machinery of these investigations is grinding slowly and relentlessly on. It just takes time.
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