MIT Technology Review : Business Report : The Next Wave of Manufacturing
You Must Make the New Machines // Economist Ricardo Hausmann says the U.S. has a chance to invent the manufacturing technology of tomorrow.
From MIT Technology : read more: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/509281/you-must-make-the-new-machines/
The basic knowledge is here, the ideas and innovation, even the entrepreneurial spirit, the problem is have we tied ourselves down with rules regulations taxes monopolies etc?
As always lots of great thought at The American Interest read more at: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/05/22/jobs-jobs-jobs-2/
First, make hiring easy and cheap.
Second, put the service economy and especially small business and entrepreneurship front and center.
Third, we need to feed the state to the people even as we individualize its services.
That third one had me puzzled till I read the explanation, which is a good description of what the statesmen of the past have done.
A characteristic of American political economy going back to colonial times has been the use of the resources of the state to promote the welfare of what today we would call the middle class. For much of our history we “fed the state to the people” by turning over publicly owned lands at low and ultimately zero cost. The public lands, which once included virtually all of the continental United States, were a possession of almost infinite value, but it seemed wiser (and more politically sustainable) to the leaders of the day to make them cheaply available to the people rather than to hoard them or try to retain a larger share of their value for the public purse.
Was reading some Mises and ran across this very neat aphorismReference
Sane sicut lux se ipsam et tenebras manifestat, sic veritas norma sui et falsi est, (Latin). A dictum of Spinoza (1632-1677). Translation: “Indeed, just as light defines itself and darkness, so truth sets the standard for itself and falsity.”
Spinoza is one of the most important philosophers—and certainly the most radical—of the early modern period. His thought combines a commitment to a number of Cartesian metaphysical and epistemological principles with elements from ancient Stoicism and medieval Jewish rationalism into a nonetheless highly original system. His extremely naturalistic views on God, the world, the human being and knowledge serve to ground a moral philosophy centered on the control of the passions leading to virtue and happiness. They also lay the foundations for a strongly democratic political thought and a deep critique of the pretensions of Scripture and sectarian religion. Of all the philosophers of the seventeenth-century, perhaps none have more relevance today than Spinoza.
Ludwig von MisesRead more at: http://mises.org/
The Ludwig von Mises Institute was founded in 1982 as the research and educational center of classical liberalism, libertarian political theory, and the Austrian School of economics. It serves as the world’s leading provider of educational materials, conferences, media, and literature in support of the tradition of thought represented by Ludwig von Mises and the school of thought he enlivened and carried forward during the 20th century, which has now blossomed into a massive international movement of students, professors, professionals, and people in all walks of life. It seeks a radical shift in the intellectual climate as the foundation for a renewal of the free and prosperous commonwealth.
Tesla Model S
Tesla has had it’s ups and downs while Fisker has had it’s blips and boops, but Elon Musk’s (Tesla and SpaceX) has proven to be a serial innovator with a bloodhound nose for the right technical – business mash up. This MIT Technology Review piece comparing these two iconic eCar companies seems right on. And points to the government force fed A123 battery company as a compounding problem.
Fisker Karma
Edited the title only…
John Deere hybrid front loader, YeaHawwwww!
Very cool! All snark aside.
Wired, Danger Room piece on after the aircraft carrier.
The Montford Point landing platform is essentially a cut down supertanker ( the predecessors of today’s Ultra Large Crude-oil Carriers, ULCC) which can ballast down and ‘lean’ so hovercraft can come aboard in open sea. One option is to similarly use this type of craft or similarly modified commercial hulls as cheap almost disposable carriers as needed. A sub divided double hull tanker is very hard to sink and the hull plates are sufficient to keep out small arms and splinters. Plus armoring and fire fighting kits are available and cheap today. The ‘fighting’ bit’ would essentially be a mod kit (a skin) that can be updated, moved around, even stored ready for war, the hull could be almost any commercial large bulk carrier. Heck large container ships are very fast today as are some RoRos, so you don’t even lose much strategic deployment speed.
Meagan McArdle, Asymmetrical Information at The Daily Beast making sense from the noise as usual. If you care about Social Security, Retirement Accounts, 401Ks, today or tomorrow, liberal or conservative, read the article, it’s possible we’ve actually got a reasonable (i.e. maybe the best distributed risk coverage that’s possible in an imperfect world) system, we just need to understand it’s on our shoulders to use it well.
Hat tip to Instapundit and Joel Gehrke for the pointer to this excellent article
The New Tammany Hall
Public sector unions have become a labor aristocracy–and they are bankrupting states and municipalities.
OCT 12, 2009, VOL. 15, NO. 04 • BY DANIEL DISALVO AND FRED SIEGEL
laying out the fundamental problem with public sector unions. When I started and even ended my 15 years as a civil servant working for the DoD I/we accepted the trade of lower wages for more certain and good benefits including retirement. That is no longer true, public sector wages have overtaken private sector wages as time has gone on and supporters have tweaked the laws to make it possible. Worse the system puts a lot of power in their hands leading to excessively aggressive defensive tactics on their part and concomitant anger on all sides as the Public – Taxpayers claw back what their supine “representatives” gave away.
A very good short piece in/on the NYT ‘Stabilization Won’t Save Us‘ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “a former derivatives trader, is a professor at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University and the author, most recently, of “Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder.”” The succinct and I believe very accurate + timely article is hopefully a sign that thinking is broadening among the elite, left and even right. To big to fail is a failed concept and our continued federal go’t idiocy shows the danger of letting too much power float to the top. It would not take that much to force (over a few years) the big banks and other over sized and overly protected corporations and guilds ( doctors, lawyers, politicians, AARP, …) to fragment into more useful+effective small scale somewhat competitive (or at least less centralized) organizations.
From my viewpoint large protected organizations with access to Big Data are somewhat troubling since the tools could facilitate continued centralization of wealth and power.
Ripped apart by financial crisis, Greek society in free-fall
This could happen to parts of the US if we do not fix our fiscal house. And that does not mean higher tax rates. It means reduced special deals for everyone, like a cap on mortgage interest tax relief at the average home price in the country etc.
Also this is in some ways a pointer to the effects of a corrupt and ineffective tax authority, Greece’s is awful, the IRS is quite good if not perfect, just remember taxes are a necessary evil, make sure the taxman is competent and fare or things can get ugly.
This World and Others 