THE INNOVATION COSTS REQUIRED TO MAINTAIN CIVILIZATION. “We need to innovate just to run in place. We need a constant stream of innovations in energy, materials, automation, and other areas just to maintain a constant standard of living. Some substantial fraction of all innovation goes toward just maintaining our current standard of living and quality of life. My guess is the fraction of all innovation toward maintaining our position is actually rising. Whether that is true is a a very important question.”
Archive for 2011
December 7, 2011
LOOKING AT the Cyber-Security Industrial Complex.
OVERSIGHT FOR THEE, BUT NOT FOR ME.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON on “Exceptional” America.
IN THE MAIL: From J. Wesley Bush, Knox’s Irregulars.
INSTAVISION: I talk to Andrew Malcolm, now blogging at Investor’s Business Daily and formerly of the Los Angeles Times about blogging and journalism. With advice for new bloggers, and for journalists.
PUTIN PROBLEMS: Mikhail Gorbachev Calls For A New Vote In Russia. “Russian authorities should annul the results of the parliamentary vote and hold a new one, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev urged Wednesday as popular indignation grew over widespread allegations of election fraud. The call for an entirely new vote by the last president of the Soviet Union was a remarkable development for an election that had not generated much interest during the campaign.” Indeed.
HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Obama back to 51 percent disapproval in latest Gallup polling.
UPDATE: Obama Grows Shorter.
A HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE PREDICTION:
We all know exactly how it will end up … with a big “pop” and a bunch of surprised politicians asking “how could this have happened?’
And the first words out of most of their mouths?
“Market failure”.
And what does that usually mean?
More government intrusion and control.
Then the cycle repeats.
Cynical, but likely true.
MICKEY KAUS DISSECTS OBAMA’S KANSAS SPEECH:
It’s pathetic if the mighty U.S. is really forced to beg corporations to produce here out of Warren-Buffetesque philanthropic urges. But it’s especially pathetic for American liberalism, which has always been most appealing when it stood up against the condescension of “alms givers”–but which now celebrates wealthy philanthropists with nauseating ease (a trend I blame, in very small part, on my old employer Slate, with its annual “Slate 60″ charity porn feature). “Giving back” is the credo of Hollywood celebrities, not New Deal liberals. Democrats are supposed to be the party of government–government that establishes a foundation for the essential dignity of working people–not the party that sucks up to the Google guys and the Gates Foundation.
At least Elizabeth Warren only wanted rich businessmen to pay higher taxes. It’s a sign of liberalism’s humiliating inability to do enough with those taxes that left-wingers now seek to substitute The Giving Pledge.
On the other hand, it fits into the Don’t Blame Barack — He’s Impotent! storyline.
UPDATE: Reader Joe O’Rourke writes:
The speech also indicated, to me, that Obama does not understand that the vast majority of medium-and-large business CEOs have only a small ownership stake in their company. The example of Intel, for example, is a poor one: Intel’s CEO may personally feel grateful to the U.S., but the vast majority of Intel owners want a safe and growing dividend and stable long-term growth.
In other words: their CEO would not be long for the position if he started re-allocating their ownership stake in ways that are more about benefitting the U.S. than Intel.
While Obama’s words are a form of demagoguery, I can’t help but feel it also shows a deep misunderstanding about how business and CEOs in most situations operate – as caretakers of others’ assets.
Indeed.
MORE: David Bernstein: Obama’s Progressive Mythology.
MORE STILL: Jim Bennett emails:
Currently, any course of action on the part of management that arguably produces lower profits than some other imaginable course of action opens that management to shareholder suits, even if the company s still profitable. Showing that a company could have made higher profits by offshoring production is relatively easy to argue. (The lawyers who write such theories of alternate courses of action are, in effect, the highest-paid alternate-history authors anywhere. Harry Turtledove pales in comparison.)
There is a substantial movement to repatriate production to the USA due to concerns over supply-chain disruption (demonstrated by the Japanese tsunami) and demonstrated problems with long-term quality control with Chinese subcontractors. Instead of campaign posturing, we might consider safe-harbor legislation shielding manufacturers from shareholder liability for declining to offshore production.
But we won’t get that from an administration that has trial lawyers as a core constituency.
Hmm. They are kind of at cross-purposes here. Though the business-judgment rule isn’t dead yet, either.
OCCUPY AND ANTISEMITISM: National Public Radio Falls Down On the Job.
NEWT GINGRICH: OBAMA IS THE “FOOD STAMP PRESIDENT.” “We are going to have the candidate of food stamps, the finest food stamp president in the American history in Barack Obama and we are going to have a candidate of paychecks.”
WHAT COULD GO WRONG: The Pentagon Is Offering Free Military Hardware To Every Police Department In The US.
This is something I’ve written about before.
GUNWALKER’S COUSIN: “Moneywalker?”
#GREENFAIL: Children left to freeze in the classrooms after head turns off heating on coldest day of year ‘to show how school can be eco-friendly.’ It’s a valuable lesson: “Eco-Friendly” just means “in the hands of the smug and sadistic.”
UPDATE: Michael Tinkler notes that at least nobody’s blowing them up. So far.
#OCCUPYFAIL: Occupiers calling for higher taxes on the 99% (they just don’t realize it). Well, if they were better at math they’d probably have jobs or something. . . .
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The Age Of Hamilton.
As President Obama travels to John Brown’s old stomping ground in Osawatomie, Kansas where Theodore Roosevelt made his New Nationalism speech in 1910, Newt Gingrich has announced that he is a Theodore Roosevelt Republican.
If you asked Theodore Roosevelt what kind of Republican he was, he would — and did — tell you that he was a proud standard bearer of the Hamiltonian tradition in American politics.
Ron Paul, who would have fought TR tooth and nail as much as he is currently fighting both President Obama and ex-Speaker Newt would agree. Gingrich, Obama and TR are all Hamiltonians, and Ron Paul thinks they are all dead wrong.
As we gear up for 2012 and beyond, American attention is increasingly returning to the oldest battle in our political history: the battle between the Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians that split George Washington’s cabinet down the middle and established our first party system.
That fight was essentially over three things that divide us intensely today: the role of the federal government, the nature of the credit system, and the future of the social hierarchy.
Read the whole thing.
HOW’S THAT “SMART DIPLOMACY” WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Obama, Canadian PM meet under Keystone pipeline cloud. “President Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper will meet at the White House Wednesday, where they are expected to unveil a border security and trade agreement. But the meeting comes amid tensions between the friendly neighbors over the Obama administration’s decision to put off action on the proposed Keystone XL oil sands pipeline until after the 2012 elections.”
REMEMBERING the Doolittle Raid.
ANN ALTHOUSE: The NYT presents liberal fear-mongers as if they were intelligent, sober critics of Republican policy. She comments: “I’d like to see some balance in the diagnosis of fear in the media, for example, the New York Times.”
BRING BACK BUGGYWHIPS: Obama Now Blames The Internet For Job Losses.
Meanwhile, with predictable snark, reader Alex Whittaker writes: “So if now the Internet is the reason for unemployment, I suppose we should reasonably blame Al Gore for the mess we’re in, as he invented the Internet.” Absolutely!
Just don’t sit next to him.