Three refutations of Republican policy voodoo

July 21, 2022 
Today in Michigan we are in the middle of a campaign season where we have a multitude of Republican candidates campaigning to give Gov. Gretchen Whitmer a second term. Ha ha.  I kid. But really. When I hear the candidates on that side speak I can't believe in any of them winning. Still, we'll see. We said the same thing about the 2016 campaign season, although with somewhat less fervor… As anyone knows, predicting the winner of a horse race, isn't common.

But I do want to address some of the voodoo bullshit these Republican candidates harp on far too endlessly.

In particular, three points on economic policy: 

Firstly, I don't think that a favorable business tax and regulatory environment is what brings people to live in a certain area. I think there are other concerns that matter more to people about where they live.

Secondly, I don't think that finding an area where people will have more discretionary income, decides where they will live either. In particular I'm referencing personal income tax regimes in certain areas. And conversely I don't think that people will take the cash over, or in exchange for, a reduction of basic services in an area they want to live in.

Third, I don't think that people want to live in an area because it is frozen into a particular economic "tradition".  To explain, slightly, the very outrageous example of something like this is the situation in certain areas of Europe where only those areas are allowed to produce a certain product. There's, like, some cheeses in France and so on.  It's called an appellation region.  In America we have, of course, Florida oranges, Vidalia onions, and Idaho potatoes, but I do not think that we can reasonably say that people would move to Florida, Georgia, or Idaho simply because those areas can produce those items that can be marketed as Florida oranges, Vidalia onions, or Idaho potatoes. 

“Woke” politics is a kind of retracing of the progress of philosophy

 “Woke” politics is a kind of retracing of the progress of philosophy.  So where should philosophy “go to” - where should it “progress to” - from here?

A lot of talk has been talked out about what it looks like to be “woke”, but not a lot about what it takes to be so woke.  A big part of the technique is to know certain techniques for education, to do them, and then to acknowledge that it is not that technique in itself, but rather what it does for you and wha is behind that technique, that is beneficial.

Do the writing, do the research, put yourself in the best social position, and know when to do what.  But realize none of those are in themselves the “secret” (although none of those “secrets” can be got except for doing those techniques.)  And be careful not to lean too hard on the concept of “bio-politics” - like, you don’t do one technique as a child and one as a teenager and one as an adult, etc.  You do whatever you need to do, but you do practice whatever technique you haven’t yet learned until you learn it, and you never stop.  But your technique at the moment is not decided by the maturation of your body.  One thing has to be acknowledged for sure: you have to know it is not about you.  

But we have to acknowledge, also, that just like we needed to “get over” object fetishism - Marx is correct on that point, and it’s not so different from common wisdom - we do also need to acknowledge that there is a “technique fetishism” as well.  Although we have raised the bar from an oral society to a written society, again and again people have shown that they can master whatever technique is imposed on them as the necessity of the times.  

-But certainly we must acknowledge that there is something beyond technique that can be said to be another property of understanding.  This is the Form, but that is the thing that is talked about by not talking about it, because talk has been set at the level of the technique.  Generally we talk about things like this most properly in terms of “thing” and consequence.  “Object” consequence is practice, but practice is pain.  (I.e. “Oh you have a nice pen; what are you going to do with it then?”)  Technique fetishism is actually fetishism of this pain and the consequence of the technique is certain secrets.  But over time the concept of the Form (that written philosophy was perhaps always trying to put off) re-emerges.  And that is the old concept with the oldest consequence.  As you develop a preference for how you use a technique, this has an effect on your audience, and if you share or don’t share it, the reaction from the audience is that people want you gone.  So, of course, go.  Because let’s not go back to classical Antiquity, but take our chance at fetishizing the next negative and/or painful thing, in order to unlock something else that is positive.  What is next, and where we should be in getting over the baggage of Antiquity is caring about what is “essential”.

Caught up

 July 20, 2022

Hey, internet.

Everything up to the latest post was published on Substack previously.  More later; copy and paste is a drag.  I look forward to hassle free publishing here.

Substack is not really my favorite platform all things considered.  Looks nice, but it’s kind of one of those “juice up your creativity by limiting yourself” kind of enterprises.  I’m just doing the writing I would have been doing anyway and I’m not looking for a special box to put it in or anything like that. 

I write by hand pretty much exclusively, and I’m posting writing pretty much so that no one does a wellness check on me.  Ha. Ha.  (Wow, a Supreme Court joke and a pandemic joke.)  But seriously, I think what I write about is worth a read, and it might help to make sense of the untrammeled insanity of the times.  Substack wasn’t the right fit, and yeah I am pissed at how they run things, so let’s put that in the past.  But it’s just a pretty box to put content in anyway, so let’s get back to the content first. 

Food politics are fookin’ strange, mate.

July 20, 2022 

Food politics are fookin' strange, mate.

So I spied with my little eye on the inter-webs today, this generalized political spat. Person A said "Right wingers in 12,000 BC be like I don't want to eat the grain. I won't live in the hut. I will not become friends with the small domesticated predator." I'm paraphrasing. Person B responded, "what's so wrong about not wanting to eat bugs."

OK. Completely absurd on its face, I admit. Not to mention completely erratic argumentation. It does summon a whole host of issues, and I won't lie about it - some of those feelings are very vaguely racist or at least racialized. Racialized to what level? To roughly the level that it's vaguely racist that in the computer game Civilization you begin your conquest of the world by beating up on generically defined "barbarians". I digress. It's a vaguely racialized tête-à-tête in so far as any conversation about agricultural civilization itself smells vaguely of superiority. 

I'm not opposed to "eating bugs" in a very generalized sense… As long as it's safe. Entomophagy is sort of generally accepted in Australian indigenous/aboriginal cultures. I have eaten food–safe crickets as a novelty, and a worm on a bet. I don't make a habit of it. (The worm was in an omelette. My Asian mom was genuinely disgusted. I was about 10. I think that she threw away the pan. That book How to Eat Fried Worms had something to do with it.) Eating bugs has a strange other set of political connotations to it. Novels from Africa (Achebe, I'm sure, mentions it) illustrates how if there are locusts on the grain crop, people have just trapped and roasted them and eaten them with honey. What are you going to do? At some level, you have to believe that Mother Nature will provide.

This is of course not all there is to the conversation. If you've seen that movie Snowpierceryou'll remember that other side of the argument. If you haven't, I'll briefly explain: imagine the only humans left on the world are on a train, segregated by class: poor in the back, rich and powerful in the front. They're all refugees from some disaster, but the rich are oppressing the poor. Anyway, there's an insurrection, and the poor find out that the "food bars" they've been eating are actually made out of bugs, and everyone ahead of the "food"-making train car are eating, you know, "real food." So there's that part of that argument too. Not unconnected to this is the third part of this "bugs" argument, which is those rumors about how Trader Joe's "Two Buck Chuck" was apparently made by the cheapest method. They throw everything in the masher, so the rumor goes: cheap grapes, bugs, rats… You get the picture. No one wants that, but they'll do the "let's not think about it" when they want to get sloshed on cheap wine. Okay, that's all true. But no one will contest that they want the tequila with the worm.

There's this metaphysical tension in this food politics conversation that's sort of tangentially about "progress run amok" but when you investigate it more closely it is really that we want to fix more of these problems we have, that have have been tabled and taken for granted, but the reaction side treats that like we pulled the problem out of thin air. Let's be honest: it's not like the wildest and freest - range food is all that much better either. 

Snowpiercer is also that movie where people are getting high on sniffing industrial waste. So there's that to consider too. I don't know why I and we are eating so many petroleum products in our yummy, flavored and colorful snacks. There is the simplistic interpretation of that other movie Soylent Green that is "do you know what's in your food?"

...There's also the deeper interpretation of Soylent Green, which is the idea that maybe we should start asking if society is actually socially planning for whether each person in the population actually has a supply of actual food that can feed them: or are we actually condemning some marginal populations to eat the scraps? This sounds like I'm flipping the script on the physiocracy–mercantilism dynamic in favor of mercantilism but that's far from the truth. We've had a long period of mercantilist policies, and that's what you get for trying to wring that rag dry for so long.

Food insecurity was essentially planned in that the farm is essentially planned. So we wanted through mercantilist policies to make the food system so very "efficient ". Grow less, but make sure it gets to everyone, is the argument. But for what hidden reason? To sell farm equipment, I suppose. And food insecurity is the result, I contend. The picture of this mercantilism is basically the opening sequence of that other movie Interstellar, if you remember that. A totally mechanized farm. Why do those on top of the social pyramid want that? Because Big Ag is acquiring all those small farms... 

One final point. Why do we want to count everyone on the Census counts even if they are undocumented or unauthorized immigrants? For simple reasons like this. They are going to be eating food too, it's not only that they're using essential services and so on. We don't want anyone to hide, or lie, because we do have to plan for everyone to be able to feed themselves.

Bringing semiconductor chip manufacturing to the US might be the biggest economic boost in many decades, at least.

 July 19, 2022

Bringing semiconductor chip manufacturing to the US might be the biggest economic boost in many decades, at least.

Ahead of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan in August, around the work the House is doing on the CHIPS Act, I want to highlight an episode of the Sinica podcast where Kaiser Kuo interviews Paul Triolo from Denton Global Advisors ASG (Albright Stonebridge Group). The topic is an overview of the semiconductor economy and supply chain.

I want to stress right off the bat that the CHIPS Act and the broader conversation about semiconductors supply chains is not about the pandemic. It's a much more lengthy discussion that involves national security and the status of Taiwan, which exists right amid one of the most fraught geostrategic relationships in the world: the trilateral relationship between the US, Taiwan and China. The dominant role that Taiwan plays in semiconductor manufacturing and the overall electronics sector is an essential part of Taiwan's national security, in its alliance with the US in our "great power competition" with China. This is very true, but it's not sufficient to fully explain the semiconductor issue to a layperson.

And secondly, the semiconductor supply issue is not really about export-import issues and certainly not about any one company being added to one of these "entity lists" of Chinese companies doing business with the Chinese army. Very much not so. For example, this assertion that this "listing" of Huawei "caused" the chip shortage is not fully explanatory of what happened. Only a fraction of the shortage could really be attributed to protectionist measures. The supply chains for semiconductors are so complex that they can't be explained away by that rhetoric. The collateral effects of these protectionist rhetorics have been unexpected and not as predicted. For instance some stuff happened in Southeast Asia that no one expected.

And the reason that the semiconductor industry's supply lines are so complicated is that the manufacture of semiconductors is, in itself, very complicated. Semiconductors need to be very precisely manufactured out of very pure materials and very pure water. Most semiconductor manufacturers are simply not able to create the semiconductors that are high-quality and advanced enough for the electronics that we need. Most of the manufacturing facilities can't turn out a semiconductor capable of being used in, for instance, a computer, an iPad, or an iPhone. It takes a highly advanced semiconductor foundry to create the semiconductor wafers that can be used to create the semiconductor chips used in most personal computing devices. Taiwan-based TSMC is one of the largest foundries making these wafers. They can make wafers up to the specifications of nearly any request, because they have that expertise.

It is important to note that a semiconductor wafer such as what TSMC makes is distinct from a finished semiconductor chip. The chip has electronics attached to the silicon wafer, and a wider range of manufacturers can make the wafers into chips. To make the silicon substrate out of which chips are made, however, takes much more expertise and specialization. TSMC is a natural monopoly on the manufacture of the silicon wafers, which is their core business. They have the long expertise and the capability to maintain high quality. But the chips that are made out of these semiconductor wafers are what there is a shortage of.

Taiwan does make semi-conductor chips as well (out of the wafers) but only for the most advanced applications. Most of the chips are made in less advanced manufacturing centers in China or Southeast Asia, that don't have to be as stringently precise as a wafer foundry. The shift to other countries to host manufacturing centers for the chips, made from the wafers that TSMC creates, does have something to do with the "trade war" between the US and China.

And this is where there is a huge opportunity for the US to enter into the manufacturing and production of these essential and fundamental electronics components: the semiconductor chips. There's two main benefits from this. First, it addresses the chip shortage in the United States in a way that also creates American jobs for American workers in an essential industry. Second, it maintains economic pressure on China, preventing it from doing any geopolitical shenanigans, like South China Sea or Belt-and-Road-type stuff. China won't be able to fully concentrate on that, if they are struggling to keep up on the electronics manufacturing front, and can't match up to the West and its allies on computing power.

Now, let's be clear. Focusing on integrating the chip manufacturing that could happen in the Rust Belt US with auto manufacturing is the right first step to integrate it into the local economies of that region. It is a need that can be quickly addressed, and a vulnerability in the automotive supply chain that can be shored up quickly with domestic manufacturing. However, there is a lot of other market need that can be addressed with US semiconductor chip manufacturing. Like a lot of policy issues, this comes down to "should we do a lot, or just a little?" But it's clear that we have to create a lot of economic opportunity and jobs out of this initiative. It will create a lot of good jobs for American workers in an industry that actually reflects where the world economy is right now. It will shore up our cyber capabilities in national defense. And it will give us an advantage in global trade relative to our main competitors. However – and this is sensitive - the reality of the situation is that this will put the US in direct market competition with China, which has longer experience in the sector. The ace in the hole in this competition is the US partnership with Taiwan. Taiwan does make chips – only the most advanced chips, and the newest applications, and over time they devolve the manufacture of those chips to other places that make larger batches. There's no reason that chip-manufacturing expertise has to go to China from Taiwan. In fact, it has been going to other places lately, in Southeast Asia, India, and so on. It's reasonably in Taiwan's interest to develop that relationship with the US, which would benefit US strategic interests too.

There's no lack of desire on the part of US workers to work a meaningful job creating things. And this is where the future is. Younger blue–collar workers see this as meaningful to their lives. We should embrace this occupation and craft in the US, not only on the level of entrepreneurship and design, but at the level of labor and education too.

US labor can bring a higher quality to the manufacturing of semiconductor chips, and the industry can bring much-needed jobs and economic opportunity to the US, especially the Rust Belt Midwest. Some have remarked that the quality of the chips manufactured of late in China have been of much lower quality than perhaps desired. And here is where US labor has an advantage, because nothing compares to the quality of a product made by a worker who has a high quality of life and workplace representation.

Performative frugality? How the economic stage is set right now

 July 18, 2022

Do we have economic problems? Yes. We do.

It's harder to explain what those problems actually are, on the level of human behavior and concerns. What we're really talking about is, in my perspective, at least three things.

Economic diagnosis in this way has something to do with the Internet, so I'll make a point on these three things. Not as an economist – I'm not one – but I do think that to lock down progress on economic analysis, every now and again, someone has to lay down what they understand to be what the economists are saying at this point in time.

We've got a big consumer debt crisis, of course; not just property-related debt but also education-related debt. That's definitely part of how the economic stage is set right now. When has there not been consumer debt in the economy? Of course there always has. But the level of debt out there is pretty high; of that we cannot deny.

The situation of the American farm is not great either. Regardless of the morality of betting on the success of a harvest, I hope we're all hoping that the higher food prices are used to improve the American food system overall, and not going to pad a few pockets in the middle of the system. Did value-added benefit the farm? I can't tell.

The third thing is kind of interesting for a different reason. There seems to be a demand problem. It seems like from the perspective of brick-and-mortar stores, consumers are not telegraphing their desires. Ergo, from their perspective, they can't tell what consumers want.

Which leads to an interesting question: are we living in an age of performative frugality? To refine this, it is true that a lot of people, especially the young, are not that well-off. On the other hand, there are really rich people these days that are "slumming it" because they can afford it. Because poverty is for them a kind of "novelty" and "adventure"? So they say - because they can escape it whenever they want.

Back to the recapitulation: do we know what Internet consumers in the middle class really want to buy? This is an open question, I gather: should the market really be addressing unusual consumer demands, or is the disparaging look from them at what is available for sale to consumers really a desire for a higher quality staple goods? Common sense would suggest that the proper state response would be to raise the bar on baseline quality rather than try to fragment the market into a bunch of novelty products. But again, I am not an economist. This just seems like the picture that the economic analysts are painting for us, at the moment.

Do you hear the words in your head as you read?

 July 18, 2022

“Teachin’ bitches how to swim.” (Death Grips, “Hacker”, from “The Money Store”, 2012, Epic Records.)

It's not the things I have done that are funny but it's the things I have nearly done. I once told a girl that I was going to be an architect, and she was very nearly impressed. Of course, being an architect is the most intellectual thing you can be outside of being an intellectual. I had a couple roadblocks on the way to becoming an intellectual as well. I could never get much into reading until I could hear the words inside my head, for example. I hated being forced to write in cursive as well, but that's a story for another day. I still hear the words I read and write "silently" to this day. No one questions whether an architect can hold the image of a design in his head as he works. And I wonder if it's not assumed that someone could also hold the sounds of words in their head as they read or write… 

Do we need all this concrete? Back to architecture for a minute… This caught my eye on the 'nets the other day. Basically we're using too much concrete. Most buildings are over designed. Concrete slabs only experience breakage stress along certain stress lines. They did the geometry on this, as far back as the 1940s. It was an Italian architect Pier Luigi Nervi, who ribbed floor slabs along their principal stress lines. A group in Zürich just recently took this to its logical conclusion by removing all the concrete from a concrete slab except along those principal stress lines, and replacing the cores with some new foam material.

Concrete is a very carbon intensive product to make. It releases a lot of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to make it. But basically 3-D printing this foam framework, to pour the concrete around, makes it possible to use much less concrete without sacrificing strength. The concrete is not cut away to make this framework-geometries-type slab, but poured into a mold you can make very quickly. 

The concrete companies might not like this because they want to sell the same amount of concrete. But it turns out we can use concrete much more efficiently, and we can use whatever new material we replace traditional concrete with, much more efficiently as well.

And I can't help but draw the analogy between this, and reading and writing without "spacing out", but rather by hearing the sound of words in your head.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Sure; a lot of well-known writers write maximally, not one word at a time, but wandering all over the space until they hit on a topic.

Sure; there is often raised a question of trust, as if an "untrustworthy" author's words could "do something" to you if you pay attention. What could it do to you if you don't pay attention? Truth is, there is the habit of the author, but there is also the choice of the reader, to develop a skill or not. And it’s not fair to portray the lack of a skill as a choice not to do it.

I won't be the one to push you in the water to learn to swim, but you are right at the edge of the pool…

That's how I see it. If concrete is also essential why was it so performative to Trump? If it is so unassailable, why was President Trump so defensive of it? Is the weight of quantity a replacement for well structured concrete slabs? I'm still not an architect; I've never worked construction trades. But I know for a fact that throwing words on paper like throwing spaghetti at the wall doesn't work. The intimidation of a large quantity of words doesn't substitute for the persuasion of a well crafted structure of words. 

There's a good reason to support less waste in concrete construction. It's a huge contributor to climate change, and the end of a livable planet. But there are solutions that embrace beauty, and to be honest, restore a modicum of dignity to the building trades. They're absurdly being told by bad actors like the former President Trump to embrace being part of the problem, when they could be the largest part of the solution. Our relationship with the built environment needs to be reinvigorated with all the passion for technology, science, and systems thinking that the populace has come to appreciate in other areas of life. The building trades can do it – they've always relished doing good work. It all comes down to turning aside "more, more", for "better, better", instead.

But I'll focus on my responsibility to my trade. And I note that F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, that as he got on in life, he started to care less and less about writing a good passage, and more and more about "writing one good sentence." He was cheekily exaggerating, of course. But pedagogically emphasizing the need for writers to try to write "one good sentence" one day means that they should not only write a lot and work hard at it, they should also write as if every minuscule part of their product matters. Perhaps if we keep at it, someone in the future will in fact write "one good sentence."

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