Sunday, November 3, 2024

Electricity: "Pearl Street, Niagara Falls and the war of the currents: The eccentric beginnings of New York's bright lights"

From the BBC, September 24:

When electricity was first rolled out in New York in the late 19th Century, sparks flew between competitors. Today, the city is attempting to complete its electric evolution.

On 7 June 1882, the lights were switched on in a lush Madison Avenue brownstone mansion, making it the first private residence in New York to be illuminated only by electricity.

Inventor and electricity pioneer Thomas Edison and his colleagues had installed wiring throughout the walls of the house, which belonged to financier and investment banker J P Morgan. Incandescent lightbulbs had been added to every room – 385 in total.

In the cellar beneath a nearby stable, a steam engine, boiler and electrical generators clanked and roared away, writes historian Jill Jones in her 2004 book Empires of Light. Connected to the house via underground cables, these were manned by an expert engineer, who started duty at 3pm and finished at 11pm. Sometimes, when the family forgot to watch the clock, they would be suddenly plunged into darkness at this point, Herbert Satterlee, Morgan's son-in-law, later wrote.

The Morgan's neighbour, Mrs James Brown complained the machines made her whole house vibrate. Morgan, though, was reportedly pleased.

But this milestone was just a test run for Edison. "Edison didn't want to build small, separate generators in millionaires' basements; he wanted infrastructure to feed the whole city," writes historian Alice Bell in her 2021 book Our Biggest Experiment: A History of the Climate Crisis. "Indeed, the beauty of electricity was that you could distance yourself from the dirt of the generation of power."

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/1376xn/p0jsbklp.jpg.webp

A model of Thomas Edison's 1882 Pearl Street power station in New York, credited 
as being the world's first commercial power station (Credit: Getty Images)

....MUCH MORE

Here's an older post on this bit of industrial wizardry:

Speaking of General Electric: "Honey, I Forgot the Anniversary: Edison's Pearl Street Station" (GE)
This was originally posted October 22, 2007.

What with all the anniversaries, the Crash of '87; the Panic of 1907*; Rio 1992; Byrd-Hagel and Kyoto 1997, I'm having trouble keeping them straight.
(*see below)

At 3 a.m. Sunday morning my failing memory woke me from a sound sleep (that and the BPH).

From the New York Times, September 5, 1882:...

"Charting the US-China Trade War: What Does 'Made in Vietnam' Mean?"

From Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge, October 24:

Chinese companies have been evading US tariffs by shipping goods through Vietnam, but not to the degree that the headlines would suggest. Ebehi Iyoha and Jaya Wen dig into trade microdata to illustrate Vietnam's strategic importance and why American policymakers should take note.

Exports from Vietnam to the United States have grown significantly since America’s trade war with China began in 2018. At the same time, Vietnam has been importing more Chinese goods. This has led many to question: is “Made in Vietnam” really “Made in China"?

Not as much as the public would think, say Ebehi Iyoha and Jaya Wen, assistant professors at Harvard Business School. By one broad measure of products, about 16 percent of US exports from Vietnam—or $15.5 billion—were estimated to be rerouted Chinese products in 2021. But that is not entirely accurate, the researchers found.


Trade “microdata” from firms’ transactions suggests that a significant portion of the imported Chinese goods added value to Vietnam’s economy through new investments that resulted in jobs and increased production. These products weren’t merely relabeled in Vietnam to evade tariffs—the true definition of rerouting, according to their recent working paper “Exports in Disguise: Trade Rerouting during the US-China Trade War?

The added value of imports only becomes clear by looking at trade data at the company level. On that basis, just 1.8 percent, or $1.7 billion, of goods were likely to have been rerouted in 2021.

Wen and Iyoha coauthored the paper with Duke University Professor Edmund J. Malesky; Sung-Ju Wu, a research fellow at the University of Nottingham in the UK; and Bo Feng, a predoctoral fellow at HBS.

Magnets for rerouting companies
Iyoha, who long observed politically charged trade disputes involving rice imports in her native Nigeria, found wide variation in rerouting across products in Vietnam. Based on company data, these goods are most likely to be rerouted.

Chinese-owned rerouters gain ground
The researchers found that rerouting increased along with the growth of companies sending their products to Americans from Vietnam. Chinese-owned firms that rerouted their goods through Vietnam gained competitive advantage....

....MUCH MORE

Related:

Jeez, back in 2019 we were posting - Vietnam Rising: "US-China trade war pushing Vietnam’s manufacturing industry to capacity"

And 2023 - "Vietnam becomes vital link in supply chain as business pivots from China"

And - "A tiger economy starts to roar in Vietnam" (except for the rare earth industry corruption)

And many more.

Not really related except as to mindset/practical use of ones brain:

Điện Biên Phủ Seventy Years On—It's Good To Understand Logistics

"60 Years Ago, Congress Warned Us About the Surveillance State. What Happened?"

It's time for another Church Committee. 

And probably the break-up of the CIA and FBI. The agencies have become little more than extortion rackets, gathering their bits and bytes of information not for the greater good of the country but to exert pressure and control on the people who pay their salaries and on the people's elected representatives.

Extortion, blackmail and coercion are what they do.They knew all about the Biden family corruption and used that information, not to warn the country but to feather their own nests and expand their power base. And that's just one example among dozens. It's a nasty business. As Senate [then]-Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Washington insider since 1980, said in January 2017:

“Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

From The MIT Press Reader, 

"We must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”

In the 1960s, Congress turned the tables and began to address the threat that the state and its use of computerized technologies posed to the privacy of its citizens. Much of this was in response to President Johnson’s proposal for a “National Data Center” in 1965 to consolidate federal databases as part of the Great Society project. Congress became alarmed and held numerous hearings in the House and Senate between 1966 and 1967 to discuss the many potential invasions of privacy represented by government control of individual data. The idea of a state repository of citizen data created quite an uproar, as explored in the text that follows, and the “National Data Center” did not come to pass.

A decade later, in 1975, the Church Committee, chaired by Senator Frank Church, convened to investigate widespread intelligence abuses by federal agencies, including the CIA, FBI, NSA, and IRS. Prompted by whistleblower Christopher Pyle’s exposé of the Army’s domestic surveillance, the committee revealed extensive government spying on American citizens, often based on political beliefs with no link to violence or foreign threats. In a chilling interview on Meet the Press that summer, Church amplified his warnings, pointing to “a future in which technological advances could be turned around on the American people and used to facilitate a system of government surveillance.” If the U.S. continued down this path, he cautioned, “No American would have any privacy left,” emphasizing that “we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”


Cultural fears about the state’s ability to track its citizens have circulated at least since the 1930s when the New Deal ushered in Social Security and a panic ensued over being assigned an identification number that would follow one all the way to the grave. These fears continued through the 1950s with the Red Scare, loyalty oaths, and the anti-Communist crusades of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. However, Congress did not devote much attention to the privacy of individual citizens until the 1960s, when concerns reached new heights, thanks in part to technological advances.

Portable recording technologies and computing began to sound alarms, as their capabilities elicited new threats to privacy rights. Such worries were amplified by the Supreme Court, as Chief Justice Earl Warren stated in a 1963 opinion regarding recording devices and entrapment: “The fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a great danger to the privacy of the individual.” In addition, a wave of writing by scholars and journalists at this time, focused on technology, privacy, and personal autonomy, helped inform public debate. In many ways this work anticipated current anxieties about the price of life under Big Tech.

Vance Packard’s “The Naked Society” (1964), Alan F. Westin’s “Privacy and Freedom” (1967), and Arthur Miller’s “The Assault on Privacy” (1971) were among the most influential in this genre. Miller understood then that the time would soon come when “our primary source of knowledge will be electronic information nodes or communications centers located in our homes, schools, and offices that are connected to international, national, regional, and local computer-based data networks.” Westin evoked many present-day issues in his wide-ranging, foundational book, paying great attention to “data surveillance” and how new technologies were affecting norms of privacy in order to recuperate this “cornerstone of the American system of liberty.” He viewed privacy and freedom as inextricably linked, defining privacy as “the claim of individuals … to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others.” “Privacy and Freedom” is still useful today for thinking about the malleable parameters of privacy, and its power in defining an individual’s relationship to the state.

This was the context in which President Lyndon B. Johnson proposed a federally controlled data center called the National Data Bank in 1965 as part of the Great Society project. The data center was imagined as a tool for efficiency and organization that would consolidate federal databases at the dawn of computerized record-keeping. However, concerns about technology and privacy were becoming widespread enough that a congressional Special Subcommittee on the Invasion of Privacy was established in the House of Representatives. Four separate hearings were held in the House and Senate between 1966 and 1967 to discuss the threats to privacy posed by the computer and the government control of data. They were dominated by overwhelming expressions of concern about the sanctity of individual privacy and civil liberties. The government’s power combined with the yet-unknown capabilities of digital technology were positioned as the main potential threat. The determination that the public needed to be protected from the centralized state collection of data above all else, without sufficient attention to the dangers lurking elsewhere, was a defining moment for cloud policy that has only grown more consequential over the decades that followed.

The chair of the Subcommittee on the Invasion of Privacy running the House hearings, Representative Cornelius “Neil” Gallagher (D-NJ), introduced the investigation of the National Data Center in July 1966 by saying, “The possible future storage and regrouping of such personal information … strikes at the core of our Judeo-Christian concept of ‘forgive and forget,’ because the computer neither forgives nor forgets.” Representative Frank Horton (R-NY) warned that “the magnitude of the problem we now confront is akin to the changes wrought in our national life with the dawning of the nuclear age.… It is not enough to say ‘It can’t happen here’; our grandfathers said that about television.” One of the original network architects of the Internet, Paul Baran, alluded to threats posed by the future cloud in his expert-witness testimony, noting that “a multiplicity of large, remote-access computer systems, if interconnected, can pose the danger of loss of the individual’s right to privacy — as we know it today.” Author Vance Packard called attention to the “suffocating sense of surveillance” engendered by a centralized government database, noting the “hazard of permitting so much power to rest in the hands of the people in a position to push computer buttons, … [because] we all to some extent fall under the control of the machine’s managers.”....

....MUCH MORE

Possibly also of interest:
"What If Stalin Had Computers?"  

"China’s National People’s Congress Is Expected to OK Fiscal Stimulus. Will It Be Enough?"

From Barron's, November 2:

The National People’s Congress Standing Committee, which has the power to approve budget adjustments, is expected to meet from Monday through Friday. 

As a key committee of China’s National People’s Congress meets this coming week, investors are again hoping Beijing will approve a fiscal stimulus big enough to revive the world’s second-largest economy.

Expectations have been rising since Beijing made a more concerted effort in September to show that authorities were focused on stabilizing the economy following a string of weak economic data and signs of growing deflationary pressures. The iShares MSCI China exchange-traded fund is up 21% so far this year, though it has fallen from its peak because Beijing has been slow to spell out what actions it might take.

While authorities have trickled out some measures, analysts and fund managers want to see more. The list of structural challenges facing the economy ranges from turning around the battered property market to finding new sources of economic growth, and while market watchers believe new approaches are needed, most analysts expect authorities to continue on their slow path to stimulus.

That could be a disappointment to investors....

....MUCH MORE

Saturday, November 2, 2024

Someone put “I Voted” stickers on Boss Tweed’s grave

This was done after the last election but I'm sure someone will find a way to get the New York politico/machine boss to vote this time round as well.

In some  jurisdictions e.g. big cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Chicago or Baltimore, locking a cemetery's gate is considered election interference. [fāke news]

And from 2022:

Boss Tweed, Realpolitik, New York Style

Having Voted, Boss Tweed Moves On To Phase Two Of Winning An Election:

https://bri-wp-images.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/BRI_APUSH_09_06_TweedElec-e1608044636222-780x571.jpg

By Thomas Nast, editorial cartoonist who took down Boss Tweed and the corruptocrats of Tammany Hall, as seen in the Library of Congress.

Automobiles: Realized Prices From The Astounding Rudi Klein Junkyard Collection (RM Sotheby's auctioneers)

From/via Messy Nessy Chic, October 23:

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. 715)

5. A Legendary “Junkyard” Collection of Classic Cars Up for Auction

https://www.messynessychic.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/collectionkleinlacasse-1.webp

Since 1967, Rudi Klein, a renowned figure in the world of collecting, had quietly amassed a remarkable collection of automotive treasures in a modest junkyard in Southern Los Angeles. Known for his discerning eye and passion for rare and unique automobiles, Klein’s collection has long been a well-kept secret, with only rumors of its existence swirling amongst certain collectors’ circles.

https://www.messynessychic.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Rudi-Klein-Collection-7-930x523.webp

Now, for the first time, RM Sotheby’s will unveil ‘The Junkyard,’ bringing to market Klein’s extraordinary collection of rare and revered automobiles, parts, and memorabilia in a series of auctions. A rare glimpse into the world of a true collector, this event offers bidders the opportunity to acquire significant models long thought lost or destroyed, along with a trove of automotive parts and treasures; true pieces of automotive history, once lost, now found....

....MUCH MORE

Click through to the catalogue which, as the auctions have been held, is now the price list.

"Saharan Dust Carries Iron That Feeds Life in the Distant Ocean"

Our preferred approach to geoengineering the carbon cycle, if one is deemed to be essential, is a gradual seeding of iron into the Southern Ocean to feed the phytoplankton and eventually sequester the carbon in the briny deep, either as sinking dead plankton cells or more probably as fish and whale poop.

But there's more to the story. If you prepare the iron to the plankton's taste you get a lot bigger effect.

From the American Geophysical Union's EOS, October 30:

A new study of seafloor sediments suggests reactions in the atmosphere convert dust-borne iron into forms more readily taken up by phytoplankton.  

Windblown iron carried on dust particles from the Sahara travels long distances. The critical nutrient is ferried to plants in the Amazon and to phytoplankton in the Atlantic Ocean and elsewhere. But much of this iron is initially locked up in molecules that are not bioavailable—cells simply can’t use it.

New research published in Frontiers in Marine Science shows that the farther this iron travels on windblown dust, the more bioavailable it becomes because of chemical reactions it undergoes while in the atmosphere.

Iron is essential for some of life’s most basic processes, playing a key role in biomolecules responsible for photosynthesis, DNA repair, and more. It’s a key constraint on the growth of phytoplankton, the bedrock of ocean ecosystems and a major driver of the planet’s carbon cycle. Iron-rich dust from the Sahara can therefore have a tremendous impact on distant ecosystems.

“There are neat interconnections across huge scales of time and space,” said Vernon Morris, an atmospheric scientist at Arizona State University who was not involved with the study. Morris leads a project called AEROSE (Aerosols and Ocean Science Expeditions) that has been following Saharan dust storms across the North Atlantic since 2004.

Connecting Air and Ocean
Making the chemical link between what happens to iron-rich dust in the atmosphere and what happens to it in the oceans has been challenging. Researchers have measured total iron levels in ocean floor sediment cores, but this approach doesn’t consider whether that iron was in forms that organisms can use, said Timothy Lyons, a biogeochemist at the University of California, Riverside, and a coauthor of the new study....

....MUCH MORE

Related:

Plankton Week: “Give me a half tanker of iron, and I will give you an ice age.”

The headline quote is from oceanographer John Martin during a 1988 lecture at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Here's NASA's Earth Observatory archive page on the statement.

It is a bit of an exaggeration, you may need ten of those Valemax bulk carriers, currently the second largest ships in the world at 400,000 dwt (Euronav's two TI oil tankers at 441,000 dwt are bigger), to make an environmental change but what a change it would be. The orders of magnitude of carbon the iron-fed plankton would sequester are almost mind-boggling:

...Martin gathered the results of the incubation experiments and laid out the evidence in support of the Iron Hypothesis together with some back‐of‐the‐envelope calculations and presented his findings at a Journal Club lecture at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in July of 1988. He estimated that using a conservative Fe : C ratio that 300,000 tons of iron in the Southern Ocean induce the growth of phytoplankton that could draw down an estimated two billion tons of carbon dioxide. Then, putting on his best Dr. Strangelove accent, he suggested that “with half a ship load of iron….I could give you an ice age.” The symposium broke up with laughter and everyone retired to the lawn outside the Redfield Building for beers (from Chisholm and Morel, Editors, preface to: What controls phytoplankton production in nutrient‐rich areas of the open sea? Limnology and Oceanography, 36, 8 December 1991). 

As repeated in "John Holland Martin: From Picograms to Petagrams and Copepods to Climate"
—Bulletin of Limnology and Oceanography, Wiley. 25 March 2016

This year's energy-sourced emissions of CO2 should come in at 30.6 gigatonnes ( 30,600,000,000 tonnes) of which a large part will reenter the carbon cycle, becoming plant material etc. but it is the stuff that remains in the atmosphere after the rest is sequestered that is available to feed the plankton.
So, very, very serious business.
Don't try this at home....
*****

....Coming up tomorrow, the Pope, and a Vancouver stock promoter.

Our series thus far:
October 27
Plankton Week: "Metal deposits from Chinese coal plants end up in the Pacific Ocean, research shows"
October 26
"Plankton Bloom Heralded Earth’s Greatest Extinction"
....MUCH MORE

"Motorcyclist Who Identifies As Bicyclist Sets Cycling World Record"

From the Babylonian Bee, October 25, 2019:

https://media.babylonbee.com/articles/article-5029-1.jpg

....MUCH MORE

And from the United Nations, 27 August 2024:

Violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences (24 page PDF)

C. Opportunity for fair and safe competition
11. Policies implemented by international federations and national governing
bodies, along with national legislation in some countries, allow males who identify
as women to compete in female sports categories.28 In other cases, this practice is not
explicitly prohibited and is thus tolerated in practice. The replacement of the female
sports category with a mixed-sex category has resulted in an increasing number of
female athletes losing opportunities, including medals, when competing against
males. According to information received, by 30 March 2024, over 600 female
athletes in more than 400 competitions have lost more than 890 medals in 29 different
sports
.29....

....MUCH MORE

That's a lot of recognition and opportunity denied because of the XX vs. XY chromosome thing. The lack of a medal can lead to the lack of a scholarship can lead to the lack of an education. It's not harmless fun and games is it.

Here's the U.N.'s mini-bio for Reem Alsalem, Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls.

Publishers and Booze

From Delancey Place:

Today's encore selection -- from Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson. 

For Johannes Gutenberg, it was the ubiquity of winemakers nearby that helped lead to the invention of the printing press around 1440 CE:

"Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE) ... tells the story of a device winemakers had recently invented, a new kind of press that employed a screw to 'concentrate pressure upon broad planks placed over the grapes, which are covered also with heavy weights above.' There is some debate among scholars over whether Pliny may have been rooting for the home team in attributing the invention to his compatriots, since evidence for the use of screw presses in producing wines and olive oils dates back several centuries, to the Greeks. But whatever the exact date of its origin, the practical utility of the screw press, unlike so many great ideas from the Greco-Roman period, ensured that it survived intact through the Dark Ages.

"When the Renaissance finally blossomed, more than a millennium after Pliny's demise, Europe had to rediscover Ptolemaic astronomy and the secrets of building aqueducts. But they didn't have to relearn how to press grapes. In fact, they'd been tinkering steadily with the screw press all along, improving on the model, and optimizing it for the mass production of wines. By the mid-1400s, the Rhineland region of Germany, which historically had been hostile to viticulture for climate reasons, was now festooned with vine trellises. Fueled by the increased efficiency of the screw press, German vineyards reached their peak in 1500, covering roughly four times as much land as they do in their current incarnation. It was hard work producing drinkable wine in a region that far north, but the mechanical efficiency of the screw press made it financially irresistible....

https://delanceyplace.com/cmsAdmin/uploads/440px-holzspindelkelter_von_1702.jpg

Early modern wine press. Such screw presses were applied in Europe to a 
wide range of uses and provided Gutenberg with the model for his printing press.

....MUCH MORE

And related from Delancey Place and elsewhere:
Information Tecchnology: Gutenberg, not a good businessman

From Delancey Place:

Gutenberg, Failed Entrepreneur
Today's selection -- from The Book: A Cover-To-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time by Keith Houston.

Johannes Gutenberg did not invent movable type, but after careful study he did make it work efficiently. Like most research and development, it was a very expensive process, and it left him bankrupt:

"In 1450 ... Johannes Gutenberg entered into an agreement with one Johann Fust (sometimes spelled 'Faust'), a Mainzer goldsmith and guildsman, to borrow a staggering 800 Rheingulden at 6 percent interest. Gutenberg's sales pitch must have been convincing, for Fust would later testify that he himself had borrowed money in order to fund the loan.

"Gutenberg sank the money into his new workshop and promptly defaulted upon the interest payments. ... [T]wo years later, as recorded in the inevitable court judgment, [Fust went] on to lent Gutenberg another 800 Rheingulden on the condition that Gutenberg take on Fust's adopted son, Peter Schöffer, as his foreman. Gutenberg assented, Schöffer was hired, and Fust paid out the second loan. ...

"[T]he prize Gutenberg had dangled in front of his financier was, of course, the invention of movable type: the promise that a book could be replicated over and over again with minimal effort. In an era when a handwritten Bible commanded a price equivalent to a laborer's yearly wage, the ability to print an endless run of books must have appeared as a license to mint Rheingulden....MORE
And related, technology early adopters:
One of my all-time favorite maps: Cities With Printing In 1450
We may post the reason for this recollection later this week (month, year) if time permits.
A link from July 2018:

"Despite the far-reaching consequences of Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press, much about the man remains a mystery, buried deep beneath layers of Mainz history".

One of my all-time favorite maps:

http://economistsview.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451b33869e2014e5f2aea65970c-800wi
That's it. Mainz.
The rest of the series are after the jump. This one is via Economists View, we have the source below.

From The BBC, May 8, 2018:

How a German City Changed how We Read
The German city of Mainz lies on the banks of the River Rhine. It is most notable for its wine, its cathedral and for being the home of Johannes Gutenberg, who introduced the printing press to Europe. Although these things may seem unconnected at first, here they overlap, merging and influencing one another.

The three elements converge on market days, when local producers and winemakers sell their goods in the main square surrounding the sprawling St Martin's Cathedral. Diagonally opposite is the Gutenberg Museum, named after the city’s most famous inhabitant, who was born in Mainz around 1399 and died here 550 years ago in 1468.
The printing press marks the turning point from medieval times to modernity in the Western world
It was Gutenberg who invented Europe’s first movable metal type printing press, which started the printing revolution and marks the turning point from medieval times to modernity in the Western world. Although the Chinese were using woodblock printing many centuries earlier, with a complete printed book, made in 868, found in a cave in north-west China, movable type printing never became very popular in the East due to the importance of calligraphy, the complexity of hand-written Chinese and the large number of characters. Gutenberg’s press, however, was well suited to the European writing system, and its development was heavily influenced by the area from which it came.

In the Middle Ages, Mainz was one of the most important cathedral cities in the Holy Roman Empire, in which the Church and the archbishop of Mainz were the centre of influence and political power. Gutenberg, as an educated and entrepreneurial patrician, would have recognised the Church’s need to update the method of replicating manuscripts, which were hand-copied by monks. This was an incredibly slow and laborious process; one that could not keep up with the growing demand for books at the time. In his book, Revolutions in Communication: Media History from Gutenberg to the Digital Age, Dr Bill Kovarik, professor of communication at Radford University in the US state of Virginia, describes this capacity in terms of ‘monk power’, where ‘one monk’ equals a day’s work – about one page – for a manuscript copier. Gutenberg’s press amplified the power of a monk by 200 times....MUCH MORE
http://maptd.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/DittmarFig1.gif

An interesting paper from VoxEU.org  February 11, 2011:
Information technology and economic change: The impact of the printing press

HT: economistsview

Friday, November 1, 2024

Microsoft tries to whittle down its carbon footprint by building data centers with engineered timber

From Seattle's own GeekWire (also serving Redmond), October 31:

Rendering of a data center that Microsoft is building using cross-laminated timber for its floors and ceilings in order to reduce the amount of steel and concrete used, which have a bigger carbon impact. The wood will be encased in a thin layer of concrete for waterproofing and durability. 
(Thornton Tomasetti Image)

Tech heavyweights are in hot pursuit of clean energy sources to power their data center operations while reining in climate impacts. But they also need to put their data center infrastructure on low-carbon diets, moving away from traditional steel and concrete.

Microsoft today announced that it’s building two data centers with engineered timber products that are climate friendly, sustainable, strong and fire resistant....

....MUCH MORE

There has to be a more elegant way to get the desired result. We looked at a similar approach in 2021's "Global Warming: Credit Suisse On You Being Responsible For CO2 Emissions (plus carbon sequestration)":

They're big into trees which is fine. I mean you like trees, I like trees, everybody likes trees.

But as a long term answer to the CO2 issue, trees don't work. Trees die, and when they die they release the stored carbon which gloms on to atmospheric oxygen and turns into CO2. Or the trees get burned, again releasing the carbon which combines with oxygen to make CO2.

The British have been working on this problem for centuries and have come up with a very clever solution: cut the trees down and then store them so they don't decay. Here's an example:

https://carpenteroak.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/westminster_timber_framed_roof-768x510.jpg

That's Westminster Great Hall. Here's a close-up of the hammer-beam roof:

https://medievallondon.ace.fordham.edu/files/original/83848e14252cbbeea7aef492f8ec17a5.jpg

Samantha Tan, “Westminster Hall's (detail of hammer-beam roof),” Medieval London, accessed November 19, 2021, https://medievallondon.ace.fordham.edu/items/show/222.

According to Samantha Tan at Fordham University's Medieval London exhibit the timbers weigh 660 tons and have sequestered the carbon in this form for over 700 years.

The British use this type of storage throughout the land and people visit from around the world to marvel at the secrets of carbon sequestration 

We'll be back to the Credit Suisse report tomorrow or you can see it here, 29 page PDF

If interested here is some of what was going on, weatherwise that century:

Weather Events In Great Britain and Ireland In the Years 1300-1399 (the Martin Rowley, booty.org.uk files)

Probably ditto for Poitiers 1356, as well.

Meanwhile In France: "Drug shooting devolves into massive brawl involving hundreds"

Sounds like one of them mêlées.

From Politico.eu, November 1:

“Between 400 and 600 people” were involved in the fighting, Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau told French media.

Hundreds were involved in a shootout and brawl over drug trafficking that seriously injured five in the French city of Poitiers, Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said Friday.

What began as a shooting outside a restaurant on Thursday night descended into a massive fight between rival gangs involving “between 400 and 600 people,” Retailleau told BFMTV/RMC radio, though BFM said it hadn’t yet been able to confirm the figures. The outlet reported that among those hurt was a 15-year-old who sustained serious wounds to the head.

Mayor Léonore Moncond’huy said that the incident was “unacceptable” in a statement on X. She added that the “youth of those involved” was “particularly worrying.”....

....MUCH MORE

There have been a few mêlées in Poitiers over the years, must be something in the water. 

"Why Civilizations Collapse" (plus: "How Late Zhou China Reverse-Engineered a Civilization")

Two from Palladium.

Usually it's drought. A couple times it was a drought by-product, dust. More after the jump.*

And why, wary yet inquisitive reader may be wondering, are we going on about this stuff?

Because you don't want to be taken by surprise. Live one's life, take care of one's business, be aware of what's possible, roll with the changes.

From Palladium Magazine's (we are fans) The Palladium Letter, March 8:

Why Civilizations Collapse

We have to evaluate the perceptions that mint facts and theory, not merely peruse the body of theories handed down to us.

This article by Samo Burja from the philosophical journal The Side View was republished on Palladium Magazine on March 8, 2024.

Why do civilizations collapse? This question bears not only on safeguarding our society’s future but also makes sense of our present. The answer relies on some of the same technē that humanity needed to build civilization in the first place: we have to evaluate the perceptions that mint facts and theory, not merely peruse the body of theories handed down to us.

Institutional failure comes as a surprise because organizations try to hide their shortcomings. They lean on other, more functional organizations in order to keep up appearances. During civilizational collapse, no organization can properly hide its own inadequacy, since the whole interdependent ecosystem of institutions is caving in on itself. States, religions, material technologies, and ways of life that once seemed self-sustaining turn out to have been dependent on the invisible subsidy of just a few key institutions. The environment of societal collapse reveals much of the otherwise obscured inner workings of crucial social technologies. After all, to analyze something is to break it apart!

Despite being an excellent epistemic opportunity, civilizational collapse seldom inspires introspection among thinkers living through it. Mayan or Roman thinkers don’t seem to have reflected on their ongoing collapse. As institutions turn to cannibalizing each other, there is little patronage or emotional energy going towards accurately describing the wider process. The notable exception that proves the rule of civilizational delusion is the Zhou Dynasty of ancient China. It is an encouraging example, since it shows a societal failure arrested and reversed by an intellectual golden age called the Hundred Schools of Thought. Confucianism, Legalism, and Taoism could only come into being with this kind of epistemic opportunity.

In the West today, we operate under the influence of our own key philosophy, which we can call scientism: the tendency to rely on scientific claims to describe the functioning of society, even when there is no empirical reason to assume that they apply. We act as if we are already living in a scientifically-planned society, immune to collapse on a time scale that any of us have to worry about. This is very far from the truth. We are certainly living in socially-engineered societies, but they are not scientifically planned in any straightforward way. Our organs of economic management do not secretly know how the economy really works. Our systems of political regulation are operating on the fumes of their institutional inheritance from two or three generations ago—the last spurt of institutional growth in Western societies happened roughly during the 1970s. At this time in the United States, new federal bodies such as the Department of Energy and Education were created and organizations such as NASA reached their modern form. Concurrently, the United Kingdom dispensed with organized labor as a political force in favor of an expanded administrative apparatus, and France saw the resignation of Charles de Gaulle, the architect of the Fifth Republic; neither country’s political economy has evolved much since.

Civilizational collapse always looms on the horizon. Though we usually think of collapse as a slow process, it can in fact happen very quickly, as was the case with the Late Bronze Age collapse. The old dictum “gradually, then suddenly” is cliché, but accurate. To ascertain whether or not we are headed for collapse, we must first analyze the functionality of our own society and pinpoint where things go wrong.

Mechanisms of Collapse
Our society is dominated by large bureaucracies. These bureaucracies break down the processing of physical goods and information into discrete tasks, such as how a factory worker puts doors on a car, or a stock trader buys futures contracts. These tasks are shorn of their context and executed in a systematized environment whose constraints are quite narrow: put the car door in, increase the portfolio value. Our society is thoroughly compartmentalized. This compartmentalization isn’t driven by the division of labor, but rather by the need to make use of misaligned talent without empowering it. By radically limiting employees’ scope of action, you make office politics more predictable. By fragmenting available knowledge, you can leverage information asymmetries to the intellectual or material advantage of the center. Some of this is necessary for scaling organizations beyond what socially connected networks can manage—but move too far towards compartmentalization, and it becomes impossible to accomplish the original mission of the organization.

Such large bureaucratic systems do not emerge organically; they require design and implementation. Empirically, we can know this simply by examining the intent of the original founders of these systems. If you want to know, say, why the FBI exists, you can find the answer in the documents of its founder, J. Edgar Hoover.  You could do the same for the IRS, or for Amazon, or for any other number of institutions.

It is very difficult, though, to apply this analysis to the construction of society. No matter how large or how small, institutions always coexist in a symbiotic relationship with other institutions. There is no Amazon without the United States government, no U.S. government without—at least—some parts of the U.S. economy. Each of these institutions depends on the others in an intricate mesh. Society is not a single institution, after all, but an ecosystem of interdependent institutions.

In addition to this complexity, non-functional institutions are the rule. Our institutions today rarely function in accordance with their stated purpose. Individuals within a given society are often very bad at judging institutional functionality. Some people spend their entire lives ruthlessly profiting from the misery of others, or greatly contributing to the prosperity of others, without even knowing that they are doing so. People who try to effect change are most often frustrated. Countless people spend their lives wrestling with a societal problem, slaving over papers for publication in academia or the nonprofit world. They act as if there is some sort of metaphorical wall which they throw their papers over, with some responsible person on the other side taking the output of their disinterested scientific study and translating it into policy, medical practice, or industrial production.

More often than not, there is nobody on the other side of that wall. Since society is so deeply compartmentalized, it rarely functions as a whole with a single purpose. Note that dysfunctionality is not a normative distinction; it often boils down to the simple reality of whether or not anyone ever follows up on key actions within the institution. It is also a question of whether or not there is a multiplier—be it individual, bureaucratic, oligarchic—behind that metaphorical wall.

Institutions often become non-functional due to the loss of key knowledge at critical junctures. Take, for example, the recent failure of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to reproduce a niche classified material known as FOGBANK that is necessary for manufacturing nuclear weapons. It took the NNSA ten years and millions of dollars to re-engineer a material that their staff in the 1980s knew how to make. That knowledge never should have been lost in the first place, but in a dysfunctional society, such loss of knowledge becomes the rule. Attempts at reverse engineering do not always succeed, if they are even made.

Civilizational collapse, then, looks like this dynamic at the scale of an entire civilization: a low-grade but constant loss of capabilities and knowledge throughout the most critical parts of our institutions, that eventually degrades our ability to perpetuate society. There might be a sudden point where the superstructure gives way dramatically, such as occurred during the Bronze Age Collapse, or there might be slow accommodation to this convergence to zero, as with the Byzantine Empire.....

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If interested, see also: "Let's Face It, When You Reap The Rewards Of Money And Power, You Want To Keep The Money And Power Flowing".

Drought and civilization:

Dust:
An Empire Brought Down By Dust
 
And: 

How Late Zhou China Reverse-Engineered a Civilization

These folks were pretty sharp. From recognizing the problem to working out and implementing a solution, wow, just wow.

From Palladium Magazine, July 10, 2020:

When archaeologists discover a sophisticated artifact like the Greek Antikythera mechanism, we conclude that some ancient societies may have been more advanced than previously believed. When we think of advanced civilizations, the image is usually one of advanced technology. Our civilization is advanced because we have rockets and nuclear power. Technology is the systematic application of knowledge, achieving goals that would otherwise be impossible. But not all technologies are material. The ability to organize human relationships, actions, and groups in organized and effective ways is itself a specialized form of knowledge called social technology.

Like material technologies, people can develop social technologies to facilitate the flourishing of society and its people. One might naturally wonder whether great social technology has ever been lost. Just as material technologies like the Antikythera mechanism can be forgotten or destroyed, are some social technologies lost to history?

Ancient China may be one such case—specifically the Shang and Early Zhou dynasties, from roughly 1600 BC to 800 BC. That era met its end as relevant knowledge on how to govern the country was corrupted and lost during the Later Zhou dynasty. With the knowledge fragmented and missing, societal decay ensued. The Warring States Period, which extended from the 5th century to the 3rd century BC, was a chaotic era which resulted from the disrepair and malfunction of this social technology. This spurred the era’s leading thinkers to recognize what was happening, albeit quite late in the process, when it was too late in many ways.

However, that these thinkers recognized what was happening at all is important and noteworthy. The blatant decline of the late Roman Empire did not lead its great thinkers to do the same. The insights and debates of the Later Zhou dynasty about the social technologies behind civilization are worth studying to apply to our own era

What to Do When Civilization Is Breaking Down
The major figures of China’s intellectual renewal came to define the famous Hundred Schools of Thought. China was unusually sophisticated when compared to the other great powers of the era. Archaeological evidence from the period documents impressive bronze works, superior to anything fashioned in the Middle East. The Zhou inherited the use of beautiful, ornamented bronze vessels called ding from earlier dynasties, using them both in sacred rituals and to symbolize temporal wealth and power. The Early Zhou dynasty spent as much bronze on these vessels as they did on their all-important bronze weaponry. This confounds modern assumptions that ancient societies did not have the material surplus to invest in “non-essentials,” often given as a reason why they appeared to remain in stasis, with little development. In fact, this period in history saw important thinkers even argue against unproductive use of wealth, a stance which would be meaningless unless that kind of investment was normal and prominent.

The assumption that these vessels represent mere luxury is unfounded. Western cathedrals are, on their face, an unproductive use of resources. But in fact, they played a central role in the social order as vehicles of coordination, ritual, legitimacy for power, and social assistance. The willingness of the Zhou rulers to invest huge resources in bronze ding implies that they played a crucial role in the social technology of the day—if one which was lost over time. The value of Zhou social technology can literally be measured in the weight of the precious bronze alloy, and was at least as important as their weaponry.

Even the period’s monumental construction suggests great skill at coordinating experts. Archaeological remains indicate palace buildings and towers of rammed earth and timber. Zhou-era art depicts two-story buildings, possibly for ritual purposes. The decay of these structures makes it difficult to know whether this era, seen by later periods as a golden age, made even greater accomplishments. When Lao Tzu blithely references a nine-story tower in one of the Tao Te Ching’s meditations, is this fantastical musing, or a reference to a real achievement—or at least an attempt? Written sources from the time point to a sophisticated feudalistic society. Reading them today reminds one of medieval Japan two thousand years later, in ways the imperial and bureaucratic China of later eras—that more obviously influenced Japan as we know it—does not.

When confronted with remarkable achievements from the past, archaeologists have been at a loss as to how to explain them. Sometimes, people will fill the gaps with fantastical theories—hence the beliefs about aliens or telepaths building the Egyptian pyramids. A more likely scenario is that either we have lost the memory of certain material technologies or of social technologies which could compensate for them. Which social technologies allowed China to achieve its feats?

Reverse-Engineering Civilization
Confucius, who died just a few years before the Warring States period, has a popular reputation among Westerners today for the wise sayings attributed to him. But his true project was to discover and restore the practices which had made the Zhou dynasty great. By doing so, he believed a ruler could renew an entire society.... 

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Sadly, all we have on offer here at Climateer Investing is the material. Last touted December 31, 2023 in: The Economist: "When civilisation collapses, will you be ready?" 

....If you're into the recreating civilization thing see Open Source Ecology's Global Village Construction Set: Machines: Global Village Construction Set

The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is a modular, DIY, low-cost, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts. We’re developing open source industrial machines that can be made at a fraction of commercial costs, and sharing our designs online for free.
gvcs-all-50
We are developing a lifesize, scalable, modular LEGO construction set.
The GVCS in itself consists of many other Construction Sets – as we build not individual machines, but construction sets of machines. As an example, the Fabrication Construction Set component can be used to build any of the other machines. Our goal is lifetime design, and low maintenance so only a few hours of maintenance per year are required to keep any machine alive.

We have built the first machine in 2007 – the Compressed Earth Brick Press. Since then, we have been moving forward steadily, improving the performance and production efficiencies of our machines. We have achieved a landmark One Day production time of the Compressed Earth Brick Press in 2012, and we intend to bring down the production time down to 1 day for each of the other machines. In 2013, we used our tractor, brick press, and soil pulverizer to build a comfortable home – the Microhouse. We continue to dogfood our tools in agriculture, construction, and fabrication – as we build our facility up to a world-class research center for open source, libre technology and decentralized production. In 2014, we will be moving to a replicable workshop model of production – integrating immersion education and production – where we intend to scale by distributing our open enterprise models far and wide. Our goal is to demonstrate how these machines contribute to creating a world beyond artificial material scarcity – by creating an open documentation, development, and production platform – towards the open source economy....MUCH MORE
The information provided in GVCS (and Climateer Group) webinars and accompanying material is for informational purposes only. It should not be considered civilizational or societal advice. You should consult with a technologist or other qualified professional to determine what may be best for your individual needs.
Past success in not a guide for future civilization performance
GVCS (and Climateer Group) do not make any guarantee or other promise as to any results that may be obtained from using our content. No one should make any survival decision without first consulting his or her own survival advisor and/or deity and conducting his or her own research and due diligence. To the maximum extent permitted by law, GVCS (and Climateer Group) disclaim any and all liability in the event any information, commentary, analysis, opinions, advice and/or recommendations prove to be inaccurate, incomplete or unreliable, or result in any deaths or other losses. Your mileage may vary, close cover before striking, not all civilizations thrive, good luck.

"Jobs Shock: October Payrolls Huge Miss As Private Payrolls Print Negative For First Time Since 2020"

That headline is disingenuous. Everybody who pays attention to this stuff, including ZH had already done the math on the effect of two hurricanes and the Boeing strike and government hiring.

That said it is interesting to see the almost knee-jerk reaction by the machines and their human-automaton brethren: Bid treasuries up which leads to dollar down etc. Anyhoo, lifted in toto from ZeroHedge as this is a short version, if history is any guide, of what they will eventually end up posting (they are still digging into the details), November 1:

In our nonfarm payrolls preview last night, we said that the October payrolls report may show the first negative print since 2020. Well, moments ago the BLS reported the highly anticipated number and... it was close: the monthly print was only 12K, a huge drop from the pre-revision 254K in October (revised naturally lower to 223K), and just 13K away from a negative print.

The print was so low it was only above the two lowest estimates (those of Bloomberg Econ for -10K and ABN Amr0 for a 0 print). That means it was a 3 sigma miss to estimates.

And of course, as has been the case for the entire Biden admin, previous months were revised sharply lower once again: August was revised down by 81,000, from +159,000 to +78,000, and September was revised down by 31,000, from +254,000 to +223,000. With these revisions, employment in August and September combined is 112,000 lower than previously reported. This means that even after the monster September revision when 818K jobs were removed, 7 of the past 9 months were again revised lower!

This means that once the November jobs are released, we can be virtually certain that October will be revised to negative.

But wait, there's more because while the total payroll number was just barely positive, if one excludes the 40K government jobs, private payrolls was in fact negative to the tune of -28K, down from 223K pre-revision last month, and the first negative print since December 2020. In other words, we were right... when it comes to actual, non-parasite "government" jobs.

Developing.

"Ford to Halt F-150 Lightning Production as EV Demand Wanes" (F; TSLA)

For folks who don't follow this stuff obsessively the key takeaway is: It is hard to manufacture electric vehicles profitably.

From Bloomberg, October 31:

  • Michigan factory to be idled for seven weeks from mid-November
  • CEO Farley has warned of ‘slow uptake’ for plug-in vehicles

Ford Motor Co. plans to shut down the Michigan factory that produces its F-150 Lightning plug-in pickup truck, its signature electric vehicle, through the end of the year as demand for EVs continues to wane.

The move is the latest blow to a model that had been a centerpiece of Ford’s EV strategy and that Chief Executive Officer Jim Farley said would be “a test for adoption of electric vehicles.” The automaker will begin a seven-week shutdown in mid-November of the Dearborn plant visited by President Joe Biden in 2021, who drove a Lightning and declared “this sucker’s quick.”

“We continue to adjust production for an optimal mix of sales growth and profitability,” Ford said Thursday in a statement.

While Lightning sales are up this year, they are far short of Ford’s ambitious expectations as many mainstream car buyers eschew EVs due to high prices and a spotty charging infrastructure. Ford began the year by cutting Lightning production in half and reducing the factory to one shift of workers, while boosting production of gasoline-fueled vehicles like the Bronco sport-utility vehicle.  

Ford stopped shipping Lightnings in February for an unspecified quality issue. And then it cut the electric pickup’s price to stimulate sales.

Farley spoke of the “slow uptake of EVs” during Ford’s third-quarter earnings call with analysts Oct. 28 and predicted Ford would lose $5 billion this year on its battery-powered models. Ford shares tumbled as it lowered its profit guidance and said it continues to struggle with high warranty costs to repair quality problems with its models....

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Even for Tesla it took a while for the Cybertruck to get profitable.
From Barron's via MSN, October 20: "Turns Out, Tesla’s Cybertruck Is a Hit" 

Thursday, October 31, 2024

"Russian court fines Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000" (GOOG)

Back to the Register, October 29 this time:

Don't hold your breath Putin

A Russian court has ruled that Google owes Russian media stations around $20 decillion in fines for blocking their content, and the fines could get bigger.

To put that into perspective, the World Bank estimates global GDP as around $100 trillion, which is peanuts compared to the prospective fine. Google would therefore have to find more money than exists on Earth to pay Moscow - but on Tuesday fell a little short of that mark when it posted $88 billion quarterly revenue.

The bizarre amount has been calculated after a four-year court case that started after YouTube banned the ultra-nationalist Russian channel Tsargrad in 2020 in response to the US sanctions imposed against its owner. Following Putin's illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022 more channels were added to the banned list and 17 stations are now suing the Chocolate Factory, including Zvezda (a TV channel owned by Putin's Ministry of Defence), according to local media....

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A decillion here and a decillion there and pretty soon you're talking real money.

Earlier from El Reg:

US Army should ditch tanks for AI drones, says [ex-GOOG CEO] Eric Schmidt

"Beijing mulls buying unsold homes for 4 trillion yuan"

From Asia Times, November 1:

Two top Chinese economists make the surprise admission that China has 9 million poor people and a high debt-to-GDP ratio  

The Chinese government is said to be considering issuance in the next five years of 4 trillion yuan (US$561 billion) in special treasury bonds in order to fund the purchase of unsold homes and idle sites in an effort to reduce inventory in the markets and support property prices.

The issuance of these bonds will come on top of the previously-reported issuance of 6 trillion yuan in ultra-long special treasury bonds, which will be implemented over the next three years, Reuters reported

It is expected that these long-term money printing schemes will be discussed in the coming standing of the National People’s Congress (NPC) Standing Committee between November 4 and 8. 

The meeting was originally scheduled for late October but it was postponed to November with some media reports saying that Beijing wants to make its final decision after the United States presidential election. 

In case the election’s winner is Republican candidate Donald Trump, who vowed to impose a 60% tariff on all Chinese goods, China may need a stronger stimulus package to maintain its economic growth for the next few years, Reuters reported, citing two unnamed sources....

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People in positions of authority are being allowed to say things that would have been inconceivable in 2016.

Something has changed in the thinking of the highest levels of the government and the Party, right up to paramount leader Xi.

Here's another example at Bloomberg via MSN: "Xi Highlights Employment Woes in Speech Published Before US Vote"

US Army should ditch tanks for AI drones, says [ex-GOOG CEO] Eric Schmidt

From The Register, October 30:

And what do you know, Google's former CEO just so happens to have a commercial solution

Former Google chief Eric Schmidt thinks the US Army should expunge "useless" tanks and replace them with AI-powered drones instead.

Speaking at the Future Investment Initiative in Saudi Arabia this week, he said: "I read somewhere that the US had thousands and thousands of tanks stored somewhere," adding, "Give them away. Buy a drone instead."

Did we mention that Schmidt is the founder of a startup called White Stork that aims to develop AI-driven attack drones?

The former Google supremo's argument is that recent conflicts, such as the war in Ukraine, have demonstrated how "a $5,000 drone can destroy a $5 million tank."

In fact, even cheaper drones, similar to those commercially available for consumers, have been shown in footage on social media dropping grenades through the open turret hatch of tanks.

Schmidt, who was CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, then executive chairman to 2015, and executive chairman of Alphabet to 2018, founded White Stork with the aim of supporting Ukraine's war effort. It hopes to achieve this by developing a low-cost drone that can use AI to acquire its target rather than being guided by an operator and can function in environments where GPS jamming is in operation.

Notably, Schmidt also served as chair of the US government's National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), which advised the President and Congress about national security and defense issues with regard to AI....

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If interested see also "Silicon Valley Freakshow: 'Silicon Valley’s Long History of Government Codependence'" or ""Do venture capitalists want forever war?" or "The Pentagon’s Silicon Valley Problem" or any of the posts on Palmer Luckey and his company Anduril:

Anti-drone technology is so hot right now.

"Elon Musk Could Have US Citizenship Revoked If He Lied on Immigration Forms"

If so, I wonder if any country anywhere in the world would take him? Or would he become The Man Without a Country? [The Atlantic magazine, December 1863 Issue]

From Wired Magazine, October 31:

The richest man in the world appears to have worked in the US without authorization. According to experts, if he did so and lied about it as part of the immigration process, he could be denaturalized.

Elon Musk could have his United States citizenship revoked and be exposed to criminal prosecution if he lied to the government as part of the immigration process, according to legal experts.

Musk, who was born and raised in South Africa and later emigrated to Canada before eventually settling in the US and becoming a citizen, has spent more than $100 million to support Donald Trump and his nativist presidential campaign, and has personally demonized immigrants. A recent Bloomberg analysis found, for example, that Musk has posted around 1,300 times on X this year about immigration and voter fraud. Many of those posts promote the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which falsely holds that Democrats seek to replace white voters with unauthorized immigrants whose votes they control, and depicts immigrants as dangerous lawbreakers.

Earlier this week, though, The Washington Post reported that Musk was himself an immigrant who had apparently broken the law. In the 1990s, he worked illegally in the United States, according to the Post, which cited “former business associates, court records and company documents.”

In 1995, according to the Post, Musk was admitted to graduate school at Stanford but didn’t enroll in classes, instead working on an online services startup that would eventually be known as Zip2. (Stanford did not reply to requests for comment.) In 1996, the Post reported, investors made a funding agreement contingent on Musk and his brother Kimbal—who has stated that the brothers were “illegal immigrants”—obtaining authorization to work in the US within 45 days. “Their immigration status was not what it should be for them to be legally employed running a company in the US,” Zip2 board member Derek Proudian told the Post.....

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Good to see the Biden-Harris administration cracking down on immigration scofflaws, whether or not the accusation is true and whether or not the WaPo's owner would benefit from much-reduced space-biz competition.

Earnings: Amazon Reports, Beats—and now for something completely different—Stock Pops (AMZN)

From Seattle's own Geekwire, October 31:

Amazon stock jumps 6%; Q3 revenue up 11% to $158.9B; profits hit $15.3B; AWS sales up 19% 

Amazon topped estimates for its third quarter earnings, reporting $158.9 billion in revenue, up 11% year-over-year, and earnings per share of $1.43. Profits jumped to $15.3 billion, from $9.9 billion in the year-ago period.

Analysts expected revenue of $157 billion and earnings per share of $1.14.

Shares were up 6% in after-hours trading on Thursday. Amazon stock is up more than 40% in the past 12 months.

Amazon Web Services met expectations with $27.4 billion in revenue, up 19%. The cloud unit continues to drive profits for the larger business, reporting $10.4 billion in operating income.

Amazon’s overall operating income reached $17.4 billion in the third quarter, compared to $11.2 billion a year ago.

Here’s a breakdown of Amazon’s financials for the third quarter....

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And here were the expectations, October 30 - "Amazon earnings preview: Analysts watching AWS growth, retail margins, Project Kuiper

Last I saw the stock was up $8.81 (+4.73%) at $195.00 after trading down $6.54 to $186.19 during the regular session.