In her book “The March of Folly,” Barbara Tuchman uses the myth of Laocoön as her first example of folly. The Trojans ignored Laocoön’s warning not to admit the Trojan horse. That didn’t end well for the Trojans. Ignoring Laocoön was folly.In his recent substack essay, The Coming Alliance Between Billionaires, Tech Giants, and MAGA-Ideologues, Vindman is a modern Laocoön, warning us of the WhatsApp group “Off Leash.” Created and managed by Blackwater...

Der Gefesselte Marx Karl Marx's preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy contains the best-known description of his theory of history. At some point contradiction between the relations of production and the forces of production become fetters on the latter, ushering in a period of social revolution. The traditional interpretation is that the social revolution will unleash technological advances that enable industrial production to expand by “leaps and bounds,” even as...

What is a good model? Whereas increasing the difference between a model and its target system may have the advantage that the model becomes easier to study, studying a model is ultimately aimed at learning something about the target system. Therefore, additional approximations come with the cost of making the correspondence between model and target system less straight- forward. Ultimately, this makes the interpretation of results on the model in terms of...

This reads like a Christmas tree where people or children get to pull a tag off the tree and whatever it states is your gift. Except this tree is the tree that keeps on giving all year. There are three charts in this Newsweek article which pictorially details the numbers of gifts and value of them to each Justice. At the end of this article is a link to an XCELL Spread Sheet which will give you the numbers and dollars associated with each...

I was never faced with a company rule or contract limiting me to work for a competitor or blocking me from using my knowledge to start a business. I did have proprietary knowledge on certain things. It just never dawned on me to use such. Something called being ethical and maintaining a good reputation. At the same time, the company rule for noncompetes, etc. seems rather rigid and strict. Or a form of bondage where you are legally bound to a...

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here. Share this:Like Loading...

It is difficult to argue against an electric vehicle when the efficiency is far greater. The only argument one could make presently is the sunk cost of your scrapping out your gasoline powered vehicle. There is no gain there and also no penalty if you keep it. The penalty of keeping it will come eventually. And then there is the paying out of another $30,000 for a new EV plus infrastructure. I am not talking about a pickup truck EV either....

(1930-2024)Maria da Conceição Tavares passed away last Sunday. She was among the key thinkers of the Latin American Structuralist School, often associated with the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA). In her case, Anibal Pinto, who was her teacher in a ECLA course in the early 1960s, and Celso Furtado, who was never formally her teacher, were her major influences. She was instrumental in introducing Kalecki in Brazilian academic circles, and in her debate with Furtado on the...

AB: I tend to believe the Pandemic caused more economic upheaval than Wall Street blowing up the economy and Main Street paying for WS’s pennies on the dollar gambling with CDS, naked CDS, etc. in the derivatives market. More was made available in 2020 onward by the government to lessen the impact of the Pandemic. This softened the blow pf the Pandemic and the economic shutdown. With the FED holding the reins on the FED Rate, timing is important...

Russ Vought is a Trump loyalist who believes we live in a “post-Constitutional” nation:““We are living in a post-Constitutional time,” Vought wrote in a seminal 2022 essay, which argued that the left has corrupted the nation’s laws and institutions. Last week, after a jury convicted Trump of falsifying business records, Vought tweeted: “Do not tell me that we are living under the Constitution.”‘Post-Constitutional’ sounds suspiciously similar to...