Even with an American ad agency working for them, the market wasn’t ready for this in 1969:
September 9, 2010
Ever wonder why Japanese cars didn’t become popular at first
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September 8, 2010
Austrian economics? That’s crazy talk
As has been observed over and over again, we’re all Keynsians now. It’s usually meant in the economic sense, but perhaps it’s a reflection of Keynes’ other famous dictum: in the long run, we’re all dead. A different school of economics deserves a longer look:
Common sense is the crux of Austrian theory economics. Austrians look at how individuals act, not how “economies” or “nations” act or behave. Ludwig von Mises, the greatest Austrian thinker, and in my opinion the greatest economist, entitled his great work, Human Action not National Action. The Austrian School was referred to by the Germans as the Psychological School because its analysis started with individual action and how those actions would either attain or fail to attain the goals sought by individuals. In other words, it involves a lot of the “common sense” that guides human behavior most of the time. It’s comforting to know there’s a philosophy of economics that conforms to what human beings actually do rather than how some economist thinks we ought to behave.
Examples of economic Newspeak flourish, especially if you listen to President Obama’s economic team. My favorite example is the present conflict between consumer spending and consumer saving. Since the crash, consumers have cut back on spending and are increasing their savings. Most economists are saying this is bad for the economy; they urge us to spend, spend, spend to save the economy.
Actually, it’s just the opposite: Saving is the road to recovery.
It seems rather obvious that during a downturn of the economy it would be natural for people to save more and spend less: They’re uncertain about their jobs; the values of their homes have plummeted (about 30% since the peak in 2006); their stocks have declined, and their debts are high. Isn’t it common sense that people are doing the rational thing by saving? This is something our parents and grandparents understood well.
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September 3, 2010
“Admitting you’re a fan of economics is another way of saying you live a deeply tragic life”
David Harsanyi loves economists — at least the ones he can quote to support his articles:
[. . .] I can’t seem to get enough of economists who blog about human behavior or write wickedly counterintuitive books about how all the bad things we do are good for society.
Professionally speaking, economists are also vital. Where else are columnists going to find a Ph.D. to corroborate all the gibberish we put in our pieces?
But the most crucial lesson I’ve gleaned from smart men and women who practice the dismal science is this: Those who claim to grasp the vagaries of the economy enough to predict the future with any amount of certitude are charlatans.
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September 1, 2010
British and French navies consider going “sharesies” on aircraft carriers
Matt Gurney reports on a bizarre scheme for Britain and France to share their carriers:
The rumoured plan to share the vessels would have certain advantages, to be sure. But it would also have certain ironies. Until the very recent past, the French and the British hated one another for approximately a thousand years, give or take a century. They battled each other endlessly, usually on the high seas. Progress is great and peace is nifty, but could anyone ever again look upon Lord Nelson’s monument in Trafalgar Square without chuckling if they knew the British Isles were protected by a glitchy French carrier named after a colossal thorn in the revered Churchill’s side?
The British have been quick to stamp out these rumours, calling them unwarranted speculation. But it’s interesting to even consider. Set aside the issue of the French and Royal navies co-operating, because stranger things have happened. Not many, but some. Every major Western military power, including Canada, is facing the same crunch. Sure, Prime Minister Harper made a big splash when his government announced plans to spend $16-billion on F-35 fighters, but lots of other things aren’t getting done. New destroyers? New search and rescue aircraft? An armoured vehicle refit? Frigate modernization? Show me the money! Or don’t. There is no money. If they are indeed discussing sharing their carriers, the French and the Brits at least deserve some credit for original thinking.
Original yes, but flawed. The rumoured plan doesn’t involve jointly constructing or manning vessels, but coordinating the patrol schedules of their respective carriers so that at least one would be at sea at all times. This would give both countries the capability to respond swiftly to threats in their shared North Atlantic area, or to react immediately to crises and disasters around the world (Whether for battle or rescue, few military assets can equal the utility of an aircraft carrier). Whichever carrier was deployed at any given time would remain under the command of its own national government, but there would apparently be contingencies to deal with a purely national military situation.
I doubt that the plan, even as scaled-down as indicated, would be workable, but it does show that the Royal Navy is seriously concerned that the new government will deprive them of the funds needed to complete the two new aircraft carriers already underway. Any extra leverage to persuade the government to avoid killing the program (like getting the French involved) may be seen as a good tactical tool.
Update, 3 September: The Guardian reports on the prospect of French/British military co-operation:
Fox stressed the coalition government’s “willingness to engage in stronger bilateral co-operation with France”.
He added: “And why France? Because there are two things that matter most when it comes to defence co-operation: the willingness to deploy and the willingness to spend on the research and development required to maintain modern military capabilities. That makes France the natural European partner for the United Kingdom.”
Fox said it was not simply a response to budgetary pressures. “It has to be driven by wider security interests.”
Morin said the two countries would come up with precise proposals by the end of October, after Britain’s strategic defence and security review.
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August 31, 2010
August 27, 2010
Uncertain economic conditions mean weak growth
As I’ve argued before, the economy won’t start to really recover until the political situation stabilizes. In an article from earlier this year, Robert Higgs makes this point very well:
The explosion of the federal government’s size, scope, and power since the middle of 2008 has created enormous uncertainties in the minds of investors. New taxes and higher rates of old taxes; potentially large burdens of compliance with new energy regulations and mandatory health-care expenses; new, intrinsically arbitrary government oversight of so-called systemic risks associated with any type of business — all of these unsettling possibilities and others of substantial significance must give pause to anyone considering a long-term investment, because any one of them has the potential to turn what seems to be a profitable investment into a big loser. In short, investors now face regime uncertainty to an extent that few have experienced in this country — to find anything comparable, one must go back to the 1930s and 1940s, when the menacing clouds of the New Deal and World War II darkened the economic horizon.
Unless the government acts soon to resolve the looming uncertainties about the half-dozen greatest threats of policy harm to business, investors will remain for the most part on the sideline, protecting their wealth in cash hoards and low-risk, low-return, short-term investments and consuming wealth that might otherwise have been invested. If this situation continues for several years longer, the U.S. economy may well suffer its second “lost decade” for much the same reason that it suffered its first during the 1930s.
Unfortunately, the incentives for politicians are biased toward meddling, so don’t anticipate a slowing down of political “fixes” any time soon. If the US mid-term elections later this year return a “gridlocked” government, the economy might start to adapt to the current conditions and only then will any significant growth begin to take place. Given a relatively static political situation, businesses can at least make some plans based on their regulatory/legislative conditions as they are. Until some kind of stability is established, no businessperson in their right mind will take on major new plans: entrenching your existing business is far safer, while trying to do something radically different incurs too much risk. Risk, that is, over and above the “ordinary” risk of expansion, launching new products, or entering new markets.
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Redesigning the American dollar bill?
Gerard Vanderleun isn’t over-enthused by the notion:
The ObamaBuck-U: A New Bill to Inspire Confident Recovery
I’d advise these sooper-genius designers to design the ObamaBuck with a lot of room for extra zeroes. Gotta plan for the forthcoming Weimarization of the US economy.
What else are these hamstrung colonized minds designing in the way of currency? Here’s there list. You can smell the overheated whiffs of sanctimony just reeking from the stack:
$1 – The first African American president
$5 – The five biggest native American tribes
$10 – The bill of rights, the first 10 amendments to the US Constitution
$20 – 20th Century America
$50 – The 50 States of America
$100 – The first 100 days of President Franklin Roosevelt. During this time he led the congress to pass more important legislations [sic] than most presidents pass in their entire term. This helped fight the economic crises at the time of the great depression. Ever since, every new president has been judged on how well they have done during the first 100 days of their term.When was the last time these fools took a history course? Third grade? Where are these drool-cup designing dolts based in the US? San Francisco, where else? The town where the homeless defecate freely on the street and where the artists defecate freely in their brains.
If nothing else, the proposed designs would do one useful thing: they’d stop Americans from sneering at the design of Canadian banknotes!
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August 25, 2010
LED lightbulbs won’t save energy in the long run
Not because they aren’t more efficient than ordinary lightbulbs, but because of the inevitable side-effects of human nature:
Federal boffins in the States say that the brave new future in which today’s ‘leccy-guzzling lights are replaced by efficient LEDs may not, in fact, usher in massive energy savings.
This is because, according to the scientists’ research, people are likely to use much more lighting as soon as this becomes practical. The greater scope for cheap illumination offered by LEDs will simply mean that people have more lights and leave them on for longer.
“Presented with the availability of cheaper light, humans may use more of it, as has happened over recent centuries with remarkable consistency following other lighting innovations,” says Jeff Tsao of the Sandia National Laboratory. “That is, rather than functioning as an instrument of decreased energy use, LEDs may be instead the next step in increasing human productivity and quality of life.”
According to Tsao and his colleagues at Sandia, the fraction of gross domestic product spent on lighting has remained constant as candles were replaced by oil lamps, then again in the transition to the gaslight era, then yet again with the arrival of electric lighting. What changed with each of these innovations was that lighting became more and more common.
Hands up, anyone who didn’t see this one coming.
“How can I buy the kind of food I want without supporting dangerous delusions?”
Eric S. Raymond has qualms over what some of his food preferences are actually going to support:
My mouth watered. “Oh Goddess,” I muttered in her direction, “it’s packaged crack for me . . .”
Ah, but then came the deadly disclaimers. “VEGAN GLUTEN-FREE NO GMOs NO TRANS FAT.” and “We support local and fair-trade sources growing certified organic, transitional, and pesticide-free products.” Aaaarrrgggh! Suddenly my lovely potential snack was covered with an evil-smelling miasma of diet-faddery, sanctimony, political correctness, and just plain nonsense. This, I find, is a chronic problem with buying “organic”.
So, what specific parts of those fluffy pro-foodie marketing terms bother ESR?
Take “no GMOs” for starters. That’s nonsense; it’s barely even possible. Humans have been genetically modifying since the invention of stockbreeding and agriculture; it’s what we do, and hatred of the accelerated version done in a genomics lab is pure Luddism. It’s vicious nonsense, too; poor third-worlders have already starved because their governments refused food aid that might contain GMOs.
[. . .]
Vegan? I’ve long since had it up to here with the tissue of ignorance and sanctimony that is evangelical veganism. Comparing our dentition and digestive tracts with those of cows, chimps, gorillas, and bears tells the story: humans are designed to be unspecialized omnivores, and the whole notion that vegetarianism is “natural” is so much piffle. It’s not even possible except at the near end of 4000 years of GMOing staple crops for higher calorie density, and even now you can’t be a vegan in a really cold climate (like, say, Tibet) because it’ll kill you.
[. . .]
Who could be against “fair trade”? Well, me . . . because the “fair trade” crowd pressures individual growers to join collectives with “managed” pricing. If you’re betting that this means lazy but politically adept growers with poor resource management and productivity at the expense of more efficient and harder-working ones, you’ve broken the code.
I share a lot of ESR’s concerns — and tastes. I don’t go out of my way to buy organic produce, but we do tend to buy local produce (in season) and our local butcher shop has been a great source of slightly-more-expensive but definitely-better-tasting meat and chicken. As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, we have to pay more attention to food labels than most folks, but we’re looking for specific ingredients, not for the marketing bumph.
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August 14, 2010
QotD: Canadians and booze smuggling
Colourful, aggressively marketed and bad for you unless consumed in moderation, spirits have a lot in common with breakfast cereal. And just as Trix are for American kids only, Canadian adults are denied quite a number of wonderful products, many of them taken for granted abroad. It’s the fault of our provincial booze monopolies, of course. The only remedy for now is to cross the border and spend those 96¢ loonies. Rather than filling the trunk with discount Smirnoff on your next trip to the States, I would suggest bringing home some of the alcoholic flavours you cannot buy here, as listed below.
Review the rules on alcohol importing on the Canada Border Services Agency’s website at beaware.gc.ca. The best policy is honestly declaring what you have; if you’re over the limit you’ll just have to pay taxes and duty (unless you live in Nunavut or the Northwest Territories, which restrict the amount of booze you bring into the country).
Also note: Alberta residents are advised to use the search function at alberta-liquor-guide.com before making any suitcase-stuffing plans. There’s a chance the products below are available at home. Surprise, surprise: The lone province that doesn’t put shelf-stocking decisions in the hands of bureaucrats offers a superior selection.
Adam McDowell, “Happy Hour: Making the most of cross-border booze shopping”, National Post, 2010-08-13
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China’s petroleum producers make more sense than the US government
Not everybody has bought into the “ethanol as a clean alternative to petroleum” bullshit: China’s petroleum producers are asking the Chinese government to stop subsidizing the corn-to-ethanol project (similar to the US government’s subsidy program).
[. . .] to enjoy the subsidy of 1880 Yuan per ton of alcoholic gasoline for vehicles and the tax-exemption policy for the corn-to-ethanol project, some plants in China began a wave of buying corn, causing the severe shortage of corn for animal feed and the rapid increase of corn prices.
“In the first half year of this year, China imported 78 million tons of corn, mainly due to the higher domestic corn price than overseas. In July, the average corn price in northeast China was 1845 Yuan per ton, rising by 15.7% year on year” said Zhang Jianbo, a market analyst with Distribution Productivity Promotion Center of China Commerce…
Of course the US has also been criticized for this insane subsidy of corn ethanol as well and blamed for dramatic price increases in corn based products in Mexico, and South/Central America.
The bottom line is corn ethanol makes no economic sense, never did, and when the total environmental impact end-to-end from dirt farm to tailpipe is considered, its even worse than ordinary gasoline. Its always been a lose/lose proposition all the way around, and many of the environmental groups have started to cool on their enthusiasm for it as the real cost/impacts manifested themselves.
Even if you’re not a whole-hearted “green”, this kind of market-rigging by government intervention should be greeted with derision: it’s not “green” to consume more resources to produce a less energy-intensive end-product and pretend it’s a viable substitute. This is another case where the government would produce better environmental results by burning the dollar bills rather than using them to subsidize corn production for ethanol.
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August 13, 2010
Raise your kid in the Rand-approved manner
Eric Hague would like to assure you that today’s little contretemps was inevitable:
I’d like to start by saying that I don’t get into belligerent shouting matches at the playground very often. The Tot Lot, by its very nature, can be an extremely volatile place — a veritable powder keg of different and sometimes contradictory parenting styles — and this fact alone is usually enough to keep everyone, parents and tots alike, acting as courteous and deferential as possible. The argument we had earlier today didn’t need to happen, and I want you to know, above all else, that I’m deeply sorry that things got so wildly, publicly out of hand.
Now let me explain why your son was wrong.
When little Aiden toddled up our daughter Johanna and asked to play with her Elmo ball, he was, admittedly, very sweet and polite. I think his exact words were, “Have a ball, peas [sic]?” And I’m sure you were very proud of him for using his manners.
To be sure, I was equally proud when Johanna yelled, “No! Looter!” right in his looter face, and then only marginally less proud when she sort of shoved him.
H/T to The Tiger who said “The shove was uncalled for . . . but I’m otherwise with the girl.”
Maybe I should try to find a copy of Eric’s “illustrated, unabridged edition of Atlas Shrugged“. It sounds like great bedtime reading for the kiddies, “glossing over all the hardcore sex parts”.
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August 11, 2010
Felicia Day talks about making The Guild
More at Fast Company.
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August 9, 2010
Apple execs’ worst fears coming true
Apple has seemed almost ham-handed in their attempts to control the media “storyline” since the iPhone 4 was released. If Eric Raymond is correct in his analysis, Apple will continue to struggle:
Apple’s bid to define and control the smartphone market is going down to defeat. I was going to describe the process as “slow but inexorable”, but that would be incorrect; it’s fast and inexorable. My prediction that Android’s installed base will pass the iPhone’s in the fourth quarter of this year no longer looks wild-eyed to anybody following these market-share wars; in fact, given the trends in new-unit sales a crossover point late in the third quarter is no longer out of the question.
There’s an important point that, so far, all the coverage seems to have missed. You can only see it by juxtaposing the market-share trendlines for both 1Q and 2Q 2010 and noticing what isn’t there — any recovery due to the iPhone 4. This product has not merely failed to recover Apple’s fortunes against Android, it has not even noticeably slowed Apple’s loss of market share to Android.
Forget for now the blunder the trade press has been calling “Antennagate”; I had fun with it at the time, but bruising as it was, it’s only a detail in the larger story. With the iPhone 4, Apple tried to counter the march of the multiple Androids using a single-product strategy, which was doomed to fail no matter how whizbang the single product was. As I predicted would happen months ago, the ubiquity game is clobbering the control game; Apple has wound up outflanked, outgunned, and out-thought.
As I’ve noted before, Apple had been running a very slick, very successful media image-building strategy of coolness and technological sophistication. For several years, they barely put a foot wrong in their complex dance of marketing and public-perception-influencing. When something finally did go wrong, they clearly lacked the ability to respond gracefully and recapture the wavering affections of both the reporters and the readers.
In short, the short-term effect of “antennagate” could have been limited to a one-off glitch: give the punters a free “bumper” for their phones, do it quickly and ungrudgingly, and reap the PR reward for being pro-active and showing that you care for your customers. Instead, the “smartest guys in the room” managed to squander almost all their accumulated goodwill in a few short weeks of bluster, denial, and arrogance. Nice work.
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