Globalization offers mankind a unique opportunity to combat climate change. Globalization is itself nothing more than the unique application of technology to provision the collection of economic rents from the arbitrage of global inequality via the mechanisms of financialization that prevail among the Earth’s economic hegemony nations. The pursuit of unearned profit is only rivaled by Dutch Disease as a leading source of distraction from the ever closing brink of the disasters facing mankind from environmental catastrophe and the political collapse of civilized republics. Thereby globalization offers a fitting end to the dominance of Earth by homo sapiens and one more chance for cockroaches to inherit the planet as the dominant species. Apparently cockroaches can survive almost any imaginable global extinction event.
Happy New Year.
Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
RE “globalization offers a fitting end to the dominance of Earth by homo sapiens and one more chance for cockroaches to inherit the planet as the dominant species”
The cockroaches are not just the leaders but the public at large. There are 2 destructive pink elephants in the room and they are MARRIED — “The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room”… https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html
“Never hide the truth to spare the feelings of the ignorant.” — Mikhail Bulgakov
Democrats in Congress released thousands of pages of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns Friday, providing the most detailed picture to date of his finances over a six-year period, including his time in the White House, when he fought to keep the information private in a break with decades of precedent.
The documents include individual returns from Trump and his wife, Melania, along with Trump’s business entities from 2015-2020. They show how Trump used the tax code to lower his tax obligation and reveal details about foreign accounts, charitable contributions and the performance of some of his highest-profile business ventures, which had largely remained shielded from public scrutiny. …
The errant surveys spooked some candidates into spending more money than necessary, and diverted help from others who otherwise had a fighting chance of winning.
Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat, had consistently won re-election by healthy margins in her three decades representing Washington State. This year seemed no different: By midsummer, polls showed her cruising to victory over a Republican newcomer, Tiffany Smiley, by as much as 20 percentage points.
So when a survey in late September by the Republican-leaning Trafalgar Group showed Ms. Murray clinging to a lead of just two points, it seemed like an aberration. But in October, twomore Republican-leaning polls put Ms. Murray barely ahead, and a third said the race was a dead heat.
As the red and blue trend lines of the closely watched RealClearPolitics average for the contest drew closer together, news organizations reported that Ms. Murray was suddenly in a fight for her political survival. Warning lights flashed in Democratic war rooms. If Ms. Murray was in trouble, no Democrat was safe.
Ms. Murray’s own polling showed her with a comfortable lead, and a nonprofit regional news site, using an established local pollster, had her up by 13. Unwilling to take chances, however, she went on the defensive, scuttling her practice of lavishing some of her war chest — she amassed $20 million — on more vulnerable Democratic candidates elsewhere. Instead, she reaped financial help from the party’s national Senate committee and supportive super PACs — resources that would, as a result, be unavailable to other Democrats.
A similar sequence of events played out in battlegrounds nationwide. Surveys showing strength for Republicans, often from the same partisan pollsters, set Democratic klaxons blaring in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Colorado. Coupled with the political factors already favoring Republicans — including inflation and President Biden’s unpopularity — the skewed polls helped feed what quickly became an inescapable political narrative: A Republican wave election was about to hit the country with hurricane force.
Democrats in each of those states went on to win their Senate races. Ms. Murray clobbered Ms. Smiley by nearly 15 points. …
… Not for the first time, a warped understanding of the contours of a national election had come to dominate the views of political operatives, donors, journalists and, in some cases, the candidates themselves.
The misleading polls of 2022 did not just needlessly spook some worried candidates into spending more money than they may have needed to on their own races. They also led some candidates — in both parties — who had a fighting chance of winning to lose out on money that could have made it possible for them to do so, as those controlling the purse strings believed polls that inaccurately indicated they had no chance at all. …
Vultures serve a useful purpose in the world consuming the remains of the dead, but not many people want to watch them eat. Reminds me of in-laws or investment bankers.
Amid a tech cold war with China, U.S. companies have pledged nearly $200 billion for chip manufacturing projects since early 2020. But the investments are not a silver bullet. …
In September, the chip giant Intel gathered officials at a patch of land near Columbus, Ohio, where it pledged to invest at least $20 billion in two new factories to make semiconductors.
A month later, Micron Technology celebrated a new manufacturing site near Syracuse, N.Y., where the chip company expected to spend $20 billion by the end of the decade and eventually perhaps five times that.
And in December, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company hosted a shindig in Phoenix, where it plans to triple its investment to $40 billion and build a second new factory to create advanced chips.
The pledges are part of an enormous ramp-up in U.S. chip-making plans over the past 18 months, the scale of which has been likened to Cold War-era investments in the Space Race. The boom has implications for global technological leadership and geopolitics, with the United States aiming to prevent China from becoming an advanced power in chips, the slices of silicon that have driven the creation of innovative computing devices like smartphones and virtual-reality goggles. …
… The chip-making boom is expected to create a jobs bonanza of 40,000 new roles in factories and companies that supply them, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. That would add to about 277,000 U.S. semiconductor industry employees.
But it won’t be easy to fill so many skilled positions. Chip factories typically need technicians to run factory machines and scientists in fields like electrical and chemical engineering. The talent shortage is one of the industry’s toughest challenges, according to recent surveys of executives.
The CHIPS Act contains funding for work force development. The Commerce Department, which is overseeing the doling out of grant money from the CHIPS Act’s funds, has also made it clear that organizations hoping to obtain funding should come up with plans for training and educating workers.
Intel, responding to the issue, plans to invest $100 million to spur training and research at universities, community colleges and other technical educators. Purdue University, which built a new semiconductor laboratory, has set a goal of graduating 1,000 engineers each year and has attracted the chip maker SkyWater Technology to build a $1.8 billion manufacturing plant near its Indiana campus.
Yet training may go only so far, as chip companies compete with other industries that are in dire need of workers.
“We’re going to have to build a semiconductor economy that attracts people when they have a lot of other choices,” Mitch Daniels, who was president of Purdue at the time, said at an event in September.
Since training efforts may take years to bear fruit, industry executives want to make it easier for highly educated foreign workers to obtain visas to work in the United States or stay after they get their degrees. Officials in Washington are aware that comments encouraging more immigration could invite political fire.
But Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary, was forthright in a speech in November at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Attracting the world’s best scientific minds is “an advantage that is America’s to lose,” she said. “And we’re not going to let that happen.”
Amid a tech cold war with China, U.S. companies have pledged nearly $200 billion for chip manufacturing projects since early 2020. But the investments are not a silver bullet. …
Of course, those ‘highly educated foreign workers (who obtained) visas to work in the United States or stay after they get their degrees’ are never going home again.
… A small band of Republican misfits have vowed to vote against Kevin McCarthy, the party’s nominee for speaker. With a razor-thin majority, just five Republicans voting against him could deny Mr. McCarthy the gavel. This would be no small event. The House last failed to elect a speaker on the first ballot in 1923, and it’s only happened once since the Civil War.
Electing a speaker is a responsibility given the House by the Constitution. Allowing the process to unravel into chaos would diminish the entire body and destroy Americans’ confidence in the new Congress. Mr. McCarthy still has time to reach an agreement with his critics, and he should do all within reason to secure the speakership on the first vote. Otherwise, a self-serving power play by a small group of Republicans threatens to make a mockery of the institution and further cement the notion that the party is not prepared to lead.
A failed vote would badly weaken Mr. McCarthy or whoever the new speaker will be. The House is a majoritarian institution, and a speaker’s power is ultimately derived from the ability to produce the 218 votes needed to do business. If Republicans are unable to muster the votes for a speaker, it will make very clear from the outset they cannot be counted on to fulfill the body’s basic responsibilities, such as funding the government or preventing a credit default by lifting the debt ceiling, both of which will be required later this year. …
… The Constitution requires that the House elect a speaker, and the vote takes priority over all other business. Nothing else can be done until the question is resolved. The House votes on a speaker before it formally adopts the set of rules governing the body. The incoming members of Congress won’t even be sworn in until after they choose a speaker.
Without House rules in place, the body operates on precedent and basic parliamentary procedure. The precedent holds that a person must have a majority of those present and voting to be elected speaker. Those absent or voting “present” are not counted in the total, and thus can lower the number needed to win a majority. Even when things run smoothly, it is a time-consuming process. Over more than an hour, all 435 members are called alphabetically, and each shouts the name of their choice.
While members are not bound to vote for a nominated person — or even for a member of the House, for that matter — the Congressional Research Service found that from 1945 to 1995, not a single member voted for anyone other than their party’s nominee. However, as our politics has become more fractured, a smattering of members have protested the party’s nominee by voting for someone else.
None of these recent protest votes have derailed the election of a speaker, however — while a failed vote Tuesday would bring the House into a state of uncertainty no member has seen in their lifetime.
The House cannot function until a speaker is elected and sworn in. Thus, the immediate order of business would be to simply vote again. The last time the first vote failed, 100 years ago, it required nine ballots over three days to name a speaker. In 1856, the speakership wasn’t resolved until the 133rd ballot. …
If five ‘moderate’ Republicans were to vote for Liz Cheney, along with all 213 Dems, there could be a new Speaker forthwith. Since the Speaker need not be a sitting member of Congress, nor a member of the majority party it would seem.
Globalization offers mankind a unique opportunity to combat climate change. Globalization is itself nothing more than the unique application of technology to provision the collection of economic rents from the arbitrage of global inequality via the mechanisms of financialization that prevail among the Earth’s economic hegemony nations. The pursuit of unearned profit is only rivaled by Dutch Disease as a leading source of distraction from the ever closing brink of the disasters facing mankind from environmental catastrophe and the political collapse of civilized republics. Thereby globalization offers a fitting end to the dominance of Earth by homo sapiens and one more chance for cockroaches to inherit the planet as the dominant species. Apparently cockroaches can survive almost any imaginable global extinction event.
Happy New Year.
Been listening to the Doors L.A.Woman this AM to lift my spirits.
RE “globalization offers a fitting end to the dominance of Earth by homo sapiens and one more chance for cockroaches to inherit the planet as the dominant species”
The cockroaches are not just the leaders but the public at large. There are 2 destructive pink elephants in the room and they are MARRIED — “The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room”… https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html
“Never hide the truth to spare the feelings of the ignorant.” — Mikhail Bulgakov
‘Four Strong Winds’ Ian & Sylvia – 1986
(Ian Tyson passed away the other day.)
Donald Trump’s tax returns released
AP via Boston Globe – two hours ago
Democrats in Congress released thousands of pages of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns Friday, providing the most detailed picture to date of his finances over a six-year period, including his time in the White House, when he fought to keep the information private in a break with decades of precedent.
The documents include individual returns from Trump and his wife, Melania, along with Trump’s business entities from 2015-2020. They show how Trump used the tax code to lower his tax obligation and reveal details about foreign accounts, charitable contributions and the performance of some of his highest-profile business ventures, which had largely remained shielded from public scrutiny. …
The ‘Red Wave’ Washout: How Skewed Polls Fed a False Election Narrative
NY Times – Dec 31
The errant surveys spooked some candidates into spending more money than necessary, and diverted help from others who otherwise had a fighting chance of winning.
Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat, had consistently won re-election by healthy margins in her three decades representing Washington State. This year seemed no different: By midsummer, polls showed her cruising to victory over a Republican newcomer, Tiffany Smiley, by as much as 20 percentage points.
So when a survey in late September by the Republican-leaning Trafalgar Group showed Ms. Murray clinging to a lead of just two points, it seemed like an aberration. But in October, two more Republican-leaning polls put Ms. Murray barely ahead, and a third said the race was a dead heat.
As the red and blue trend lines of the closely watched RealClearPolitics average for the contest drew closer together, news organizations reported that Ms. Murray was suddenly in a fight for her political survival. Warning lights flashed in Democratic war rooms. If Ms. Murray was in trouble, no Democrat was safe.
Ms. Murray’s own polling showed her with a comfortable lead, and a nonprofit regional news site, using an established local pollster, had her up by 13. Unwilling to take chances, however, she went on the defensive, scuttling her practice of lavishing some of her war chest — she amassed $20 million — on more vulnerable Democratic candidates elsewhere. Instead, she reaped financial help from the party’s national Senate committee and supportive super PACs — resources that would, as a result, be unavailable to other Democrats.
A similar sequence of events played out in battlegrounds nationwide. Surveys showing strength for Republicans, often from the same partisan pollsters, set Democratic klaxons blaring in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Colorado. Coupled with the political factors already favoring Republicans — including inflation and President Biden’s unpopularity — the skewed polls helped feed what quickly became an inescapable political narrative: A Republican wave election was about to hit the country with hurricane force.
Democrats in each of those states went on to win their Senate races. Ms. Murray clobbered Ms. Smiley by nearly 15 points. …
The ‘Red Wave’ Washout: How Skewed Polls Fed a False Election Narrative
NY Times – Dec 31
… Not for the first time, a warped understanding of the contours of a national election had come to dominate the views of political operatives, donors, journalists and, in some cases, the candidates themselves.
The misleading polls of 2022 did not just needlessly spook some worried candidates into spending more money than they may have needed to on their own races. They also led some candidates — in both parties — who had a fighting chance of winning to lose out on money that could have made it possible for them to do so, as those controlling the purse strings believed polls that inaccurately indicated they had no chance at all. …
(The above post will be more cogent when/if the first part of the article makes it through moderation.)
Vultures serve a useful purpose in the world consuming the remains of the dead, but not many people want to watch them eat. Reminds me of in-laws or investment bankers.
US Pours Money Into Chips
NYTimes – Jan 1
but Even Soaring Spending Has Limits
Amid a tech cold war with China, U.S. companies have pledged nearly $200 billion for chip manufacturing projects since early 2020. But the investments are not a silver bullet. …
In September, the chip giant Intel gathered officials at a patch of land near Columbus, Ohio, where it pledged to invest at least $20 billion in two new factories to make semiconductors.
A month later, Micron Technology celebrated a new manufacturing site near Syracuse, N.Y., where the chip company expected to spend $20 billion by the end of the decade and eventually perhaps five times that.
And in December, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company hosted a shindig in Phoenix, where it plans to triple its investment to $40 billion and build a second new factory to create advanced chips.
The pledges are part of an enormous ramp-up in U.S. chip-making plans over the past 18 months, the scale of which has been likened to Cold War-era investments in the Space Race. The boom has implications for global technological leadership and geopolitics, with the United States aiming to prevent China from becoming an advanced power in chips, the slices of silicon that have driven the creation of innovative computing devices like smartphones and virtual-reality goggles. …
… The chip-making boom is expected to create a jobs bonanza of 40,000 new roles in factories and companies that supply them, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. That would add to about 277,000 U.S. semiconductor industry employees.
But it won’t be easy to fill so many skilled positions. Chip factories typically need technicians to run factory machines and scientists in fields like electrical and chemical engineering. The talent shortage is one of the industry’s toughest challenges, according to recent surveys of executives.
The CHIPS Act contains funding for work force development. The Commerce Department, which is overseeing the doling out of grant money from the CHIPS Act’s funds, has also made it clear that organizations hoping to obtain funding should come up with plans for training and educating workers.
Intel, responding to the issue, plans to invest $100 million to spur training and research at universities, community colleges and other technical educators. Purdue University, which built a new semiconductor laboratory, has set a goal of graduating 1,000 engineers each year and has attracted the chip maker SkyWater Technology to build a $1.8 billion manufacturing plant near its Indiana campus.
Yet training may go only so far, as chip companies compete with other industries that are in dire need of workers.
“We’re going to have to build a semiconductor economy that attracts people when they have a lot of other choices,” Mitch Daniels, who was president of Purdue at the time, said at an event in September.
Since training efforts may take years to bear fruit, industry executives want to make it easier for highly educated foreign workers to obtain visas to work in the United States or stay after they get their degrees. Officials in Washington are aware that comments encouraging more immigration could invite political fire.
But Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary, was forthright in a speech in November at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Attracting the world’s best scientific minds is “an advantage that is America’s to lose,” she said. “And we’re not going to let that happen.”
US Pours Money Into Chips
NYTimes – Jan 1
but Even Soaring Spending Has Limits
Amid a tech cold war with China, U.S. companies have pledged nearly $200 billion for chip manufacturing projects since early 2020. But the investments are not a silver bullet. …
Of course, those ‘highly educated foreign workers (who obtained) visas to work in the United States or stay after they get their degrees’ are never going home again.
A Failed Speaker Vote for Kevin McCarthy Would Be a Historic Event
NY Times – Jan 2
… A small band of Republican misfits have vowed to vote against Kevin McCarthy, the party’s nominee for speaker. With a razor-thin majority, just five Republicans voting against him could deny Mr. McCarthy the gavel. This would be no small event. The House last failed to elect a speaker on the first ballot in 1923, and it’s only happened once since the Civil War.
Electing a speaker is a responsibility given the House by the Constitution. Allowing the process to unravel into chaos would diminish the entire body and destroy Americans’ confidence in the new Congress. Mr. McCarthy still has time to reach an agreement with his critics, and he should do all within reason to secure the speakership on the first vote. Otherwise, a self-serving power play by a small group of Republicans threatens to make a mockery of the institution and further cement the notion that the party is not prepared to lead.
A failed vote would badly weaken Mr. McCarthy or whoever the new speaker will be. The House is a majoritarian institution, and a speaker’s power is ultimately derived from the ability to produce the 218 votes needed to do business. If Republicans are unable to muster the votes for a speaker, it will make very clear from the outset they cannot be counted on to fulfill the body’s basic responsibilities, such as funding the government or preventing a credit default by lifting the debt ceiling, both of which will be required later this year. …
… The Constitution requires that the House elect a speaker, and the vote takes priority over all other business. Nothing else can be done until the question is resolved. The House votes on a speaker before it formally adopts the set of rules governing the body. The incoming members of Congress won’t even be sworn in until after they choose a speaker.
Without House rules in place, the body operates on precedent and basic parliamentary procedure. The precedent holds that a person must have a majority of those present and voting to be elected speaker. Those absent or voting “present” are not counted in the total, and thus can lower the number needed to win a majority. Even when things run smoothly, it is a time-consuming process. Over more than an hour, all 435 members are called alphabetically, and each shouts the name of their choice.
While members are not bound to vote for a nominated person — or even for a member of the House, for that matter — the Congressional Research Service found that from 1945 to 1995, not a single member voted for anyone other than their party’s nominee. However, as our politics has become more fractured, a smattering of members have protested the party’s nominee by voting for someone else.
None of these recent protest votes have derailed the election of a speaker, however — while a failed vote Tuesday would bring the House into a state of uncertainty no member has seen in their lifetime.
The House cannot function until a speaker is elected and sworn in. Thus, the immediate order of business would be to simply vote again. The last time the first vote failed, 100 years ago, it required nine ballots over three days to name a speaker. In 1856, the speakership wasn’t resolved until the 133rd ballot. …
If five ‘moderate’ Republicans were to vote for Liz Cheney, along with all 213 Dems, there could be a new Speaker forthwith. Since the Speaker need not be a sitting member of Congress, nor a member of the majority party it would seem.