Month: December 2022

This is a flower that was growing in one of the British World War II cemeteries in Normandy. But what is it? It's nothing I can come even close to recognizing.

I was browsing around this evening and ran across a piece from Glenn Greenwald in which he complains that a clip from his streaming news show was removed from TikTok—apparently because he called Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky a "corrupt, authoritarian oligarch." Glenn goes on to suggest that this might have happened due to influence from the US government.

I doubt that, because I frankly doubt that our national security establishment cares what Glenn thinks about Zelensky. However, Glenn also linked to a recent article from Reuters about the more general battle over national security between TikTok, based in China, and the US government.

Long story short, TikTok is working hard to appease the US. It has contracted with Oracle to store all its US data. It has created a group called the United States Data Security (USDS) division to oversee data protection. And it has agreed to allow Oracle to inspect both its client-side and server-side code to ensure that nothing fishy is going on.

This is all fine, just part of the usual tug-of-war between the US and China. But there's also this:

TikTok has already unveiled several measures aimed at appeasing the U.S. government, including...a United States Data Security (USDS) division to oversee data protection and content moderation decisions....TikTok has also proposed to form a "proxy" board that would run the USDS division independent of ByteDance, the sources said.

....The USDS board would have three members who would be screened by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a national security panel, the sources said. ByteDance would not have control over the board and its decisions even though it would pay for the USDS division's operations, the sources added.

Unless this is a sloppy mistake, it implies that a board appointed by¹ government agents would oversee a TikTok division that handles content moderation decisions.

Nobody has agreed to this yet, but would it be unusual if it happened? Obviously the US government has all sorts of agencies that oversee foreign activities, but do we have agencies like this one that, in principle, could be signing off on specific decisions about what speech a foreign platform is and isn't allowed to host?

I don't know. Any ideas out there?

¹"Screened by" = "appointed by" for all practical purposes.

For those of you who have heard about Tesla's plummeting stock price and wonder what's going on, a quick look at their history might clear things up:

Tesla was not always a crazy unicorn stock. For ten years it just slowly burbled along. Then, for some reason, it exploded at the beginning of the pandemic.

Why? It's something of a mystery. But whatever the reason, it was always bound to burn itself out and eventually return to earth. That's what's happening now, and the timing suggests it most likely has little to do with Elon Musk, Twitter, or a woke backlash. Tesla is just a car company facing increasing competition and investors are finally waking up to that.

If you don't believe me, perhaps you'll believe the brilliant Cal economist Brad DeLong:

Remember: NONE of the interest-rate increases the Fed has undertaken since its lift-off from zero have yet had time to affect the real economy of demand, production, and employment. And NONE of the interest-rate increases the Fed has undertaken since its lift-off from zero will begin to have effects on inflation for at least another six months. The inflation trajectory is, so far, what it would have been had the Fed stayed at zero up to this moment. That means that there is, now, an awful lot of monetary contraction in the pipeline.

The thing to keep firmly in mind at all times is that we've been living in an artificial world since the start of the pandemic. Nothing is happening because of organic defects or strengths in the underlying economy, but because of either the pandemic itself or our response to it.

The Fed, however, can't bring itself to believe this. They continue to live in a world where inflation is a sign of deep economic cancer that has to be ruthlessly hacked away before it metastasizes—and damn the consequences. They simply can't abide the notion that the best response in our current situation was always to do nothing until the pandemic economy went away on its own.

So instead they did something. They made things worse. Huzzah. Poor people across the country are going to pay the price for this by next summer.

It's triptych time again. Here are three shots of John Isner on the practice court at this year's French Open. From top, he's serving, hitting a forehand, and twirling his racket.

Here's your good news for the end of the year:

The price of gasoline at the pump continues to decline. For the full year, it went from $3.28 to $3.09, with a temporary peak in summer thanks to the Ukraine war.

And in case you're interested, here is the price of gasoline since the end of the Great Recession, adjusted for inflation:

Since 2010, the average inflation-adjusted price for a gallon of regular is $3.61. Right now gasoline is selling for 50 cents less than that.

This is the USS Enterprise (CVN 65), the first nuclear aircraft carrier ever built. Its keel was laid just a few weeks before I was born and she was decommissioned half a century later. The Enterprise's inactivation was completed several years ago and it's now being stored at Hampton Roads, Virginia, where I shot this picture.

The previous post reminded me of something that a few of you might find useful: a way of remembering certain facts and figures that are often hard to keep in mind. I first starting using this years ago to convert temperatures from Celsius to Fahrenheit. The problem is that most metric conversions have fairly easy approximations:

But not temperature. Celsius has a complicated conversion formula that few of us can calculate on the spot. So instead just try to remember a few easy numbers:

Use these approximations for ten-degree Celsius intervals and you know everything you're likely to need unless you design thermostats or work on the Mars Rover.

Here's one for inflation:

Inflation has doubled since 1995 and gone up 10x since 1965. Here is family income:

The key here is to be happy with rough approximations and to choose only three or four easy data points to remember. Maybe someday I'll make a whole book of these handy conversions.

The Wall Street Journal has a longish piece today on what it's like to retire on $1 million in these parlous times. "Once a symbol of extravagant wealth," the authors say, "$1 million is now the retirement-savings goal for millions of Americans."

True enough. And since a picture is worth a thousand words, here's what $1 million will buy you today vs. half a century ago:

Back in 1965, $1 million would buy you a whole neighborhood of median houses. Today you can buy two, if you're lucky enough to live in a median place.

Put a different way, for a 1965 millionaire an average house would amount to only a paltry 2% of his assets. For today's sham millionaires it's half their total wealth.

Why did China suddenly loosen its notoriously strict COVID-19 rules a few weeks ago? Was it because of that rioting in Shanghai and elsewhere protesting the lockdowns? Spare me. That might have helped a bit, but China under Xi Jinping has shown no great patience with citizens who don't behave. Just ask the residents of Hong Kong.

I think the answer is much simpler. Consider this extensive timeline of China's recent history:

October 23: Xi is formally elected to his unprecedented third term as Chinese president. Nothing was likely to stop this, and Xi was determined to make sure that nothing would stand a chance.

December 7: COVID lockdown rules are eased and replaced with nothing. Overnight, China goes from have the world's toughest COVID rules to having almost no rules at all.

Yes, there were a few riots between those dates. But they probably didn't mean much. What really happened is that Xi was dead set on keeping things calm in the run-up to his triumphant election, and once that was in the bag he figured it was a good time for the inevitable. He couldn't keep China locked down forever, and his "grip on power," as it's universally called, was firmly unassailable. Might as well bite the bullet and let the peasants die.

That's my take, anyway. One thing for sure, though, is that Xi has demonstrated no concern at all for taking any steps that might reduce either COVID cases or deaths. It's every man for himself as long as things stay serene and obedient in Zhongnanhai.