C.S. Lewis On Who Buys Into Propaganda and Misinformation

From Mr. Lewis' novel That Hideous Strength:

 “Why you fool, it's the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.”

That would seem to describe the Russia, Russia, Russia phenomena of a few years ago, with the caveat that many who repeated the b.s. may not have totally believed things like Mr. Steele's hookers peeing on a bed but the vilifiers either didn't care if it was true, may have wanted it to be while others the calumniators.

As we've seen, Machiavelli considered calumny* a scourge on the Roman Republic and its usage the playground of political low-lifes. It is such a threat to representative government that Machiavelli in his discourses on the first ten books of Livy's history of the Roman Republic mentions calumny (The making of false and defamatory statements about someone in order to damage their reputation; slander...O.E.D.) at least a hundred times and in fact dedicates a chapter (XIII of book I) to making the distinction between accusation as a tool for finding the truth and calumny as a method of destruction:

XIII In proportion as accusations are useful in a republic, so are calumnies pernicious

He was against it.

The all-knowing one (Wikipedia) describes the Lewis book as:

That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups is a 1945 novel by C. S. Lewis, the final book in Lewis's theological science fiction Space Trilogy.

*Calumny

1. A false statement maliciously made to injure another's reputation.
2. The utterance of maliciously false statements; slander.
3. False accusation of a crime or offense, maliciously made or reported, to the injury of another; malicious misrepresentation; slander; detraction.

—from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition via Wordnik

Izabella Kaminska is Seeing Hints Of The Old Soviet Central Planning In Western Politico-Capital Economic Discourse

Specifically shades of the Central Planning Board of the USSR, the Gosplan.

Really pushing for gosplan 2.0 https://t.co/yYQ5N4r5YN

— Izabella Kaminska (@izakaminska) June 21, 2024

addendum: a perfect example is using the American Strategic Petroleum Reserve for political purposes.

Capital Markets: "US Dollar Offered, but Intra-Day Momentum Indicators are Stretched"

From Marc Chandler at Bannockburn Global Forex:

Overview: The Dollar Index reached its best level since May 1 before the weekend but has come back softer against all the G10 currencies and most emerging market currencies. There is no apparent driver, and the intraday day momentum indicators caution against expecting much in the way of follow through gains in North America. The dollar edged closed to JPY160 and triggered official intervention warnings. The market has turned cautious and is threatening to end the yen's seven-day slide. Among emerging market currencies, the South African rand, Turkish lira, and a few East Asian currencies are softer including the Chinese yuan.

Equities are mostly higher, but the Asia Pacific region struggled. Among the large markets, only Japan and India managed to rise. The Shanghai and Shenzhen Composites and Taiwan's Taiex fell by over 1%. Europe's Stoxx 600 is recouping most of the pre-weekend loss (~0.75%), while US index futures are trading with a firmer bias. Benchmark 10-year yields are mixed. European premiums over Germany are narrower. European bond yields are mostly 2-3 bp lower while the 10-year Germany Bund yield is a basis point higher. The 10-year US Treasury yield is little changed near 4.25%. It rose about 3.5 basis points last week after falling nearly 28 bp in the previous two weeks. Gold recorded a bearish outside down day ahead of the weekend but there has been no follow through selling and softer dollar may have helped give it a mild bid today. It is stalling near the 20-day moving average (~$2332.50). August WTI rallied nearly 3.5% for the second consecutive week last week to approach $82 a barrel. It pulled back before the weekend but is firmer today above $81....

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"Meet the 10 most active investors in generative AI"

 From PitchBook, June 11:

AI valuations are far outpacing other verticals, a sign of a continued willingness to invest—even if it comes at a premium.

Cohere, a large language model developer, has reportedly been in talks to raise $450 million at a $5 billion valuation. In April, AI search engine Perplexity raised $62.7 million at a $1.04 billion valuation. And in February, AI cloud computing startup Lambda raised a $320 million Series C at a $1.5 billion valuation.

Here are the 10 most active VC investors in generative AI since 2019, according to PitchBook data....

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"China controls the graphite supply chain, but Bill Gates-backed startup Molten Industries is looking to change that..."

Not to be confused with the ill-fated Molten Metals Technology.

From Bloomberg, June 20:

Key EV Battery Material Can Come From a Surprising Source: Methane
China controls the graphite supply chain, but Bill Gates-backed startup Molten Industries is looking to change that by creating the material from gas.

Graphite is key to manufacturing the lithium-ion batteries that power everything from electric cars to smartphones. While China is the world’s top producer and exporter of the crystalline carbon, there’s been a push to grow a US supply chain.

Oakland-based startup Molten Industries is working to build it by relying on something that’s cheap and abundant in the US: natural gas. The company has developed a specialized technique to break methane into graphite and hydrogen, the latter of which can be used as a source of clean energy. The effort is funded in part by a $25 million Series A financing round led by Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV). 

“This is at the intersection of two really important climate tech theme areas for us at Breakthrough: making batteries scaleable and more cost-effective to drive EV sales to grow, and on the other side, low-cost clean hydrogen,” said BEV Managing Director David Danielson.  

Big automotive companies are hungry for low-cost, reliable domestic graphite due to international supply chain issues, he added. Graphite is typically mined or made synthetically from fossil fuels, and China controls about three-quarters of the world’s graphite anode supply chain, according to data from mineral intelligence firm Benchmark....

....MUCH MORE

"What oil bust?"

It's all dependent on politicians. Should they impose Pigouvian taxes or other schemes to raise prices, glut turns to scarcity pretty fast. That's the reason our first inductee to the Climateer Hall of Fame was Senator Simon Cameron D and R of Pennsylvania:

Our Hero

"The honest politician is one who when he is bought, will stay bought."

From Reaction Magazine, June 21:

The International Energy Agency says it is “leading a new era of international energy co-operation.” There’s clearly a lot of leading to be done, with Russia using its oil to wage war on Ukraine, but you can hardly blame the IEA for trying. Earlier this month, it produced its bumper oil annual, predicting that “oil markets are on course for a major surplus this decade”. The Times reported this as a “staggering” surplus, while OPEC+, the oil producers’ cartel, called it “dangerous.” Certainly, if the IEA is right, there’s a big danger to the producers’ balance sheets.

It is quite brave of the IEA to keep sticking its neck out over prices, year after year, since its record is, well, mixed. In 2019, it concluded that there was “no peak in oil demand in sight”. The next year, Covid had dented that expectation, and the verdict was “demand expected to contract.” By 2021, “demand is set to rise every year through 2026”. This bold forecast was qualified with “stronger policies and behaviour changes could bring on a peak in demand soon.” Well, who’da thunk it?

It is too easy to mock others’ forecasts, as any forecaster knows. But let us suppose that this time the IEA is right, while OPEC+ is just whistling to keep its spirits up, and that we are headed for a lasting glut of oil (and gas). The obvious consequence will be falling prices. For the world’s most important commodity, that would have quite an impact. The massive transfer of wealth from a few producers to everyone else would stimulate growth all over the place, so bring it on.

Yet it is not only the producers who would suffer. Cheap oil would deliver a body-blow to net-zero ambitions everywhere....

....MORE

Here's the IEA along with Bloomberg's Javier Blas, June 18:

Javier Blas: "Saudi Consumption — Not Production — Is Key to Peak Oil"

"Out of the Mouth of Bots: Child Genius and Generative Machines"

From the Los Angeles Review of Books, May 26:

MINOU DROUET WAS a child-poet. Born in 1947, she captivated postwar France with poems that the newspaper Le Figaro, as quoted by Time in 1955, called “sparkling with spontaneous sensations, new tingling images.” At the time, much of the French public was skeptical that Drouet’s poems could have been crafted by a child. Even experts in cultural production were drawn in. André Breton speculated that “[b]etween the physico-mental structure of Minou and what is published under her name there is an incompatibility of structure.” And a simple examination of the texts concluded that they exhibited a maturity of expression and experience of life unavailable to a child. The girl was forced to prove—through a series of tests by journalists, police, and the French Society of Authors, Composers, and Publishers of Music—that it was she, and not her overbearing mother, who was the “true” author of the poems. Those who admired or speculated about the authenticity of Drouet’s poetry did so under the presumption that it was of some quality—but by any critical standard, it wasn’t.

Today, Minou Drouet is perhaps best known thanks to an essay in Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (1957), which explores the consumerist mania that surrounded the child-poet as a desirable object of attention. Barthes classifies Drouet’s work as “a docile, sugary poetry, entirely based on the belief that poetry is a matter of metaphor, its content nothing more than a kind of elegiac, bourgeois sentiment.” Her poetry is, in his analysis, predictable fluff and formula. Barthes concludes that Drouet was successful at replicating the signs of poetry, not poetry itself: she gave French culture what it believed poetry to be. By focusing on whether or not Drouet was “genuine,” and thus a “genius,” Barthes said her readers took part in “valorizing simple […] production” and thus obscured the fact that she was essentially regurgitating the clichés of the culture around her—like the postwar fetishization of childhood itself. In the publicity photographs taken of her as a child, Drouet looks like a model for a Normal Rockwell painting: playing the piano, writing poetry, petting a cat....

....In late November, Google released a video demonstrating its new conversation-bot software, Gemini, fluidly interacting with a user.....

....MUCH MORE

"FX Bubbles: Through the Lens of Shiller and Sornette"

From the CFA Institute's Enterprising Investor blog, June 11:

Posted In: Behavioral Finance, Economics, History & Geopolitics, Philosophy

It is widely understood that psychological factors such as perceptions and herd mentality can significantly influence stock market dynamics and precipitate speculative bubbles and abrupt market corrections. Less appreciated is the fact that the foreign exchange (FX) market is equally susceptible to such risks and perhaps more so in the context of geopolitical events.

The FX market — an over-the-counter marketplace that sets exchange rates for currencies worldwide — is the largest market globally in terms of trading volume. We’re going to look at bubbles in the FX market through the lens of Robert Shiller and Didier Sornette.

A notable example of an FX market bubble and crash is the case of the Icelandic króna during the early 2000s. The króna appreciated significantly following the deregulation of Iceland’s financial sector in 2001, which allowed financial institutions to expand and facilitated greater foreign investment. This financial-sector expansion, combined with Iceland’s high interest rates, attracted considearble speculative investment as herd mentality settled in.

In early 2007, The Economist ranked the Icelandic króna as the most overvalued currency based on its Big Mac Index. The bubble burst during the global financial crisis of 2008, resulting in a severe depreciation of the króna and a dramatic economic collapse for Iceland.

Shiller Challenges Neoclassical Models
When speaking about price bubbles in any asset class, it is essential to start with Shiller’s theories and then move onto Sornette’s models. Shiller’s insights into financial market dynamics challenge traditional neoclassical models and offer a deeper understanding of purely speculative price runups that can be applied to FX markets. His theories, particularly the Excess Volatility Hypothesis, suggest that just like stock markets, the FX market might experience volatility that exceeds what could be justified by economic fundamentals such as interest rates, inflation rates, or balance of payments.

Shiller’s integration of behavioural finance into the analysis of financial markets underscores the significant role of psychological factors in trading and investment decisions. In the FX market, this could manifest as currency values being influenced by perceptions, herd behaviour, and overreactions to news — factors that can drive the market away from fundamental values and potentially lead to speculative bubbles and abrupt corrections.

Questioning the efficient market hypothesis, Shiller proposes that markets may not always efficiently incorporate new information, a theory applicable to FX markets. Anomalies such as predictable patterns from carry trade opportunities suggest that FX markets, similar to stock markets, exhibit moments where past pricing data could help predict future movements.

Shiller advocates for a broader approach to understanding financial markets, one that includes non-economic factors such as geopolitics, market sentiment, and economic events. These factors can influence currency prices and induce large-scale speculative movements, akin to bubbles seen in other financial markets.

Shiller’s theories provide a framework for understanding the FX market that goes beyond classical economic analysis, incorporating the interplay of economic, psychological, and sociological factors. This comprehensive approach challenges the purely rational and efficient market paradigm and highlights the need for a nuanced view of FX dynamics. This broader perspective is crucial for predicting and understanding the subtleties of currency fluctuations and the often-irrational behaviour of market participants.

Enter Sornette: A Model to Predict Bubbles
When measuring bubbles, Sornette inevitably comes to mind. The researcher explores the phenomena of financial crashes and the dynamics of capital markets. He delves into the patterns and behaviours that lead to market failures, focusing on the critical concept of bubbles. Unlike traditional definitions, which rely on comparing an asset’s price with its often difficult-to-measure fundamental value, a financial bubble in this context is characterized by the detection of unsustainable movement in the asset’s price....

....MUCH MORE

We are fans of Doc Shiller, if interested use the 'search blog' box, upper left. 

 

If interested in more on Didier Sornette we have on offer: 

July 2017

ETH Zurich: "Didier Sornette's Supercomputer Is Betting On A Market Crash"

We've visited the good Professor a few times over the years but got bored. (actually I called him a flake)

Financial Crisis Observatory: Global Bubble Status Report--Oct. 1, 2014 

From Didier Sornette and ETH Zurich*:

 The Financial Crisis Observatory (FCO) is a scientific platform aimed at testing and quantifying rigorously, in a systematic way and on a large scale the hypothesis that financial markets exhibit a degree of inefficiency and a potential for predictability, especially during regimes when bubbles develop. 

*Swiss Federal Institute, Zürich

FCO homepage
Status report 21 page PDF

And August 2014:
...The Honest Broker for the Week of August 16, 2014

Using valuation measures for market timing doesn't work so we're left with stuff like Zürich's Didier Sornette's thinking, links after the jump. Quick spoiler: no crash this month....
(he said with 14 days to go)

...In 2013's "UPDATED--Commodities and High Frequency Trading: Prices Being Driven By Price Moves Rather Than Fundamentals" after I called him a flake we linked to Sornette's "Quantification of the High Level of Endogeneity and of Structural Regime Shifts in Commodity Markets" (56 page PDF)

That post also linked back to:

Econophysicist Predicts Date of Chinese Stock Market Collapse--Part II
Forecasting Financial Crashes: The Ultimate Experiment Begins

And FT Alphaville's wonderfully titled "Dragon-king of the outlier events".

See also:
"The Illusion of the Perpetual Money Machine"
Innovation as a Social Bubble: The Example of the Human Genome Project

Via SSRN:
Power Law Scaling and "Dragon-Kings'' in Distributions of Intraday Financial Drawdown

And via Google News:
"Didier Sornette: Wir sprechen von Blasen, wenn wir ...

Ad-Hoc-News (Pressemitteilung)-Aug 8, 2014

€uro am Sonntag: Herr Sornette, wie definieren Sie eine Blase? Didier Sornette: Wir sprechen von Blasen, wenn wir superexponentielles ...

And more at his ETH Zürich Chair of Entrepreneurial Risks homepage

"The Secret to Living Past 120 Years Old? Nanobots"

 Ray Kurzweil at Wired, June 13:

In The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge With AI, the spiritual sequel to his (in)famous 2005 book, Ray Kurzweil doubles down on the promise of immortality.

We are now in the later stages of the first generation of life extension, which involves applying the current class of pharmaceutical and nutritional knowledge to overcoming health challenges. In the 2020s we are starting the second phase of life extension, which is the merger of biotechnology with AI. The 2030s will usher in the third phase of life extension, which will be to use nanotechnology to overcome the limitations of our biological organs altogether. As we enter this phase, we’ll greatly extend our lives, allowing people to far transcend the normal human limit of 120 years.

Only one person, Jeanne Calment—a French woman who survived to age 122—is documented to have lived longer than 120 years. So why is this such a hard limit to human longevity? One might guess that the reasons people don’t make it past this age are statistical—that elderly people face a certain risk of Alzheimer’s, stroke, heart attack, or cancer every year, and that after enough years being exposed to these risks, everyone eventually dies of something. But that’s not what’s happening. Actuarial data shows that from age 90 to 110, a person’s chances of dying in the following year increase by about 2 percentage points annually. For example, an American man at age 97 has about a 30 percent chance of dying before 98, and if he makes it that far he will have a 32 percent chance of dying before 99. But from age 110 onward, the risk of death rises by about 3.5 percentage points a year.

Doctors have offered an explanation: At around age 110, the bodies of the oldest people start breaking down in ways that are qualitatively different from the aging of younger senior citizens. Supercentenarian (110-plus) aging is not simply a continuation or worsening of the same kinds of statistical risks of late adulthood. While people at that age also have an annual risk from ordinary diseases (although the worsening of these risks may decelerate in the very old), they additionally face new challenges like kidney failure and respiratory failure. These often seem to happen spontaneously—not as a result of lifestyle factors or any disease onset. The body apparently just starts breaking down.

Over the past decade, scientists and investors have started giving much more serious attention to finding out why. One of the leading researchers in this field is biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey, founder of the LEV (Longevity Escape Velocity) foundation. As de Grey explains, aging is like the wear on the engine of an automobile—it is damage that accumulates as a result of the system’s normal operation. In the human body’s case, that damage largely comes from a combination of cellular metabolism and cellular reproduction. Metabolism creates waste in and around cells and damages structures through oxidation (much like the rusting of a car!). When we’re young, our bodies are able to remove this waste and repair the damage efficiently. But as we get older, most of our cells reproduce over and over, and errors accumulate. Eventually the damage starts piling up faster than the body can fix it.

The only solution, longevity researchers argue, is to cure aging itself. In short, we need the ability to repair damage from aging at the level of individual cells and local tissues. There are a number of possibilities being explored for how to achieve this, but I believe the most promising ultimate solution is nanorobots.

And we don’t need to wait until these technologies are fully mature in order to benefit. If you can live long enough for anti-aging research to start adding at least one year to your remaining life expectancy annually, that will buy enough time for nanomedicine to cure any remaining facets of aging. This is longevity escape velocity. This is why there is sound logic behind Aubrey de Grey’s sensational declaration that the first person to live to 1,000 years has likely already been born. If the nanotechnology of 2050 solves enough issues of aging for 100-year-olds to start living to 150, we’ll then have until 2100 to solve whatever new problems may crop up at that age. With AI playing a key role in research by then, progress during that time will be exponential. So even though these projections are admittedly startling—and even sound absurd to our intuitive for linear thinking—we have solid reasons to see this as a likely future.

I’ve had many conversations over the years about life extension, and the idea often meets resistance. People become upset when they hear of an individual whose life has been cut short by a disease, yet when confronted with the possibility of generally extending all human life, they react negatively. “Life is too difficult to contemplate going on indefinitely” is a common response. But people generally do not want to end their lives at any point unless they are in enormous pain—physically, mentally, or spiritually. And if they were to absorb the ongoing improvements of life in all its dimensions, most such afflictions would be alleviated. That is, extending human life would also mean vastly improving it.

But how will nanotechnology actually make this possible? In my view, the long-term goal is medical nanorobots. These will be made from diamondoid parts with onboard sensors, manipulators, computers, communicators, and possibly power supplies. It is intuitive to imagine nanobots as tiny metal robotic submarines chugging through the bloodstream, but physics at the nanoscale requires a substantially different approach. At this scale, water is a powerful solvent, and oxidant molecules are highly reactive, so strong materials like diamondoid will be needed.

And whereas macro-scale submarines can smoothly propel themselves through liquids, for nanoscale objects, fluid dynamics are dominated by sticky frictional forces. Imagine trying to swim through peanut butter! So nanobots will need to harness different principles of propulsion. Likewise, nanobots probably won’t be able to store enough onboard energy or computing power to accomplish all their tasks independently, so they will need to be designed to draw energy from their surroundings and either obey outside control signals or collaborate with one another to do computation....

....MUCH MORE

Fluid dynamics, very important. Provide a proof of the "Navier–Stokes Equation" and win yourself a million bucks. And that's just the start of the opportunity. It might be as large as a trillion dollars.

If interested see:
January 2020
The Trouble With Turbulence
In the introduction to a post on fish and the Little Ice Age last July I mentioned how mind-bendingly complex fluid dynamics can be.

September 2021
Fluid Dynamics (and the filth on your phone)

This is one of those fields of study that are so mind-bogglingly complex that, short of having a supercomputer close to hand, we can only approximate as to the details. See also weather, markets, and any other complex/chaotic system you can think of.So anyone who can get a handle on what is actually going on with this stuff gives a whole 'nother meaning to the concept of smart.

September 2021
Think You're Smart Don'tcha: Figure This Out And Make A Million Bucks

In last week's post "Fluid Dynamics (and the filth on your phone)" I made the assertion "This is one of those fields of study that are so mind-bogglingly complex that....", without supplying any supporting statements or facts.
(in these situations the reader can assume I am relying on the Charlie Munger all-purpose turnaround: "Think about it a little more and you will agree with me because you're smart and I'm right.")

June 2023
Figure This Out And Make A Million Bucks: Now With Penguins
First up, the penguins, from Chalkdust, (A Magazine For The Mathematically Curious)....

June 2023
Follow-up To "Figure This Out And Make A Million Bucks..."

There is a lot more money involved than just the million dollars from the Millennium Prize for understanding fluid dynamics and turbulence. In the climate arena the coupled climate models are still not all that skillful when trying to comprehend the interactions of the sea and the atmosphere, a huge and extraordinarily complex part of the whole picture and not that well understood.

On a much smaller scale, understanding turbulence can be worth hundreds of millions to billions of dollars when siting turbines on a wind farm.....

The Promise of Precision Agriculture Is Slowly Coming to Fruition

From Undark, June 18:

Collecting granular data about farm operations promised a revolution. Improvements have come, but only incrementally.

For 20 years, Pablo Sobron sought a better way to learn exactly what was in the soil, rock, or any other substance on Mars.

Instead of sampling and laboratory analysis — the old way of soil testing — scientists began to use lasers and sensors to get high precision data quickly. Eventually, that led Sobron to think the same type of technology could work on Earth, particularly farms.

“The idea is to do exactly what we do on Mars, which is drive and, without stopping, get real time measurements of every square inch if you want to. As small as you want,” he said.

Impossible Sensing, the company Sobron founded in St. Louis, is now working on the second iteration of a prototype, designed to be mounted to the back of a planter. It will help farmers see exactly what’s happening in their soil in real time as they drive through their fields, revealing information about nutrient levels, soil health, water conditions, and other factors around individual plants.

“Our thinking is that having more precision on knowing what areas of the farm can take more or less [fertilizer] will allow them to apply what’s needed,” he said. “The real value and the real need here is to give insights, give knowledge; prescribe what to do and when.”

It’s what precision agriculture has promised since the 1990s — if growers get more granular data about their operations and the technology, they will put that newfound information to use for more efficient and sustainable farms.

Yet, Sobron admits all the new technology around precision ag has yet to fully transform farming. “It’s not delivering on the hype that it was sold,” Sobron said.

There have been many advancements over the years that have boosted precision. New tractors can use GPS to steer themselves and farmers now have the ability to change the rate at which they apply seeds or fertilizer on their fields. Even crop genetics and how weeds are managed have advanced.

“The only thing we have not advanced is the sensor,” he said. “The ability to see things that matter, in both the plants, the soil, and the roots.”

All of that data should help farmers make choices that will not only boost their bottom line, but curb the overuse of fertilizers and other chemicals and be more targeted about irrigation.

---

The federal government has an eye on more targeted fertilizer use, as well. Speaking in southern Illinois in May, U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the farm bill proposed by Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow supports research into new sensing technology.

“Many of our corn acres are being over fertilized,” he said. “As sensor technology gets more readily available, precision agriculture is an opportunity for us to really educate farmers.”

Vilsack said these kinds of sensors could help farmers reduce the overuse of fertilizer, which runs off of farms, polluting rivers, lakes, groundwater and even the Gulf of Mexico.

Attention from the federal government can entice many companies to focus on developing the technology, said Alison Doyle, associate director at the Iowa State University Research Park.

“Whatever the government becomes interested in, dumps federal money into, you’re going to see people innovating in those spaces,” she said. “Because there’s going to be money to drive behavior in that area.”

Sobron’s Impossible Sensing isn’t the only company looking to bring more precision, automation, or other technology to farming practices. Many bigger agriculture companies are also looking beyond seeds, fertilizer, and traditional farm equipment....

....MUCH MORE

We’re Still Waiting for the Next Big Leap in AI

Large Language Models are not the be-all and end-all of Artificial Intelligence. At best they are regurgitators of accumulated human knowledge. The future of generative AI is at present unknown and probably unknowable. (think AI using AI to train AI)*

From Wired, June 20:

Anthropic’s latest Claude AI model pulls ahead of rivals from OpenAI and Google. But advances in machine intelligence have lately been more incremental than revolutionary.

When OpenAI announced GPT-4, its latest large language model, last March, it sent shockwaves through the tech world. It was clearly more capable than anything seen before at chatting, coding, and solving all sorts of thorny problems—including school homework.

Anthropic, a rival to OpenAI, announced today that it has made its own AI advance that will upgrade chatbots and other use cases. But although the new model is the world’s best by some measures, it’s more of a step forward than a big leap.

Anthropic’s new model, called Claude 3.5 Sonnet, is an upgrade to its existing Claude 3 family of AI models. It is more adept at solving math, coding, and logic problems as measured by commonly used benchmarks. Anthropic says it is also a lot faster, better understands nuances in language, and even has a better sense of humor.

That’s no doubt useful to people trying to build apps and services on top of Anthropic’s AI models. But the company’s news is also a reminder that the world is still waiting for another AI leap forward in AI akin to that delivered by GPT-4.

Expectation has been building for OpenAI to release a sequel called GPT-5 for more than a year now, and the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, has encouraged speculation that it will deliver another revolution in AI capabilities. GPT-4 cost more than $100 million to train, and GPT-5 is widely expected to be much larger and more expensive.

Although OpenAI, Google, and other AI developers have released new models that out-do GPT-4, the world is still waiting for that next big leap. Progress in AI has lately become more incremental and more reliant on innovations in model design and training rather than brute-force scaling of model size and computation, as GPT-4 did.

Michael Gerstenhaber, head of product at Anthropic, says the company’s new Claude 3.5 Sonnet model is larger than its predecessor but draws much of its new competence from innovations in training. For example, the model was given feedback designed to improve its logical reasoning skills.

Anthropic says that Claude 3.5 Sonnet outscores the best models from OpenAI, Google, and Facebook in popular AI benchmarks including GPQA, a graduate-level test of expertise in biology, physics, and chemistry; MMLU, a test covering computer science, history, and other topics; and HumanEval, a measure of coding proficiency. The improvements are a matter of a few percentage points though....

....Gauging the rate of progress in AI using conventional benchmarks like those touted by Anthropic for Claude can be misleading. AI developers are strongly incentivized to design their creations to score highly in these benchmarks, and the data used for these standardized tests can be swept into their training data....

 ....MUCH MORE

* Here are some folks taking a whack at the prediction biz:

• Gartner: "3 Bold and Actionable Predictions for the Future of GenAI"
• Harvard on Digital: "The Future of Generative AI: Expert Insights and Predictions"
• MIT Technology Review: "These six questions will dictate the future of generative AI"

Progress On Direct Air Capture Of Carbon Dioxide: "Climeworks Captures Double the CO2 for Half the Energy"

Still a long way to go before this approach is anywhere near cost-effective. And even then there are activists and pressure groups that don't want any human-related CO₂ releases, from agriculture and hydrocarbons and maybe even exhaled breath. (not kidding: see voluntary human extinction movement, Club of Rome [not to one billion as some have claimed but much lower than current levels], Paul Ehrlich etc) and they look upon DAC as enabling continuing releases. All that being said, here's the intro to a 2021 post "Carbon Sucking in Iceland":

This story is an opportunity for me to throw an editorial wrapper around a short announcement.

The plant is small and the technology is expensive but this really is the wave of the future.

As to size, a few years ago Sweden's Lund University calculated that Bill Gates' 59 trips on his jets (I think he has four now, two big Airbus' and two big Gulfstreams) produced 1600 tonnes of CO2.

Here's the headline story and then a bit more editorializing. From The Chemical Engineer, September 21:

Climeworks starts up industrial-scale direct air capture facility

CLIMEWORKS has started operations at the world’s largest direct air capture and CO2 storage facility, in Iceland.

The construction of the facility, known as Orca, began in May 2020. It is constructed with advanced modular technology of container-sized units and has a capture capacity of 4,000 t/y of CO2. It is situated next to ON Power’s Hellisheiði Geothermal Power Plant so that it runs entirely on renewable electricity. The captured CO2 will be stored underground by partner Carbfix, which mixes the CO2 with water for rapid underground mineralisation in a process that takes less than two years....

....MORE

From IEEE Spectrum, June 5:

The world’s first megaton carbon capture site will join a growing field

The geoengineering debate—which, in part, concerns pulling back carbon that’s already in the atmosphere—has been hindered to date by the lack of scalable tech. The Swiss startup Climeworks is hoping to help turn the tide.

The Zurich-based company has just unveiled the latest generation of its direct-air capture (DAC) technology, which it says will help remove millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide a year by the end of the decade.

Climeworks has, in fact, already made a name for itself by building a series of large-scale carbon capture plants in Iceland. The company switched on a facility dubbed Mammoth last month, which is now the world’s largest DAC plant and will ultimately be able to pull 36,000 tonnes of CO₂ out of the air annually.

But speaking at the opening of the Climework’s annual Carbon Removal Summit in Zurich yesterday, co-CEO Jan Wurzbacher noted that according to projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world will probably need to be removing between 6 billion and 16 billion tonnes of CO₂ a year by 2050.

“If we look at our scale-up curves—our growth rates that we need between now and 2050, to achieve those goals—those rates are very similar to the ones that solar PV and wind have shown over decades as well.” —Jan Wurzbacher, Climeworks

While that remains a distant goal, the company has taken a modest step in that direction with the announcement of the third generation of its DAC technology. The new system features a revamped cubelike design and a reengineered sorbent (the material used to absorb CO₂), which Wurzbacher said can capture twice as much carbon dioxide as the previous design. The new system also uses half the energy, while the materials are projected to last three times as long—all of which cuts overall costs by 50 percent....

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The 2021 rant continued:

....So this plant, currently the world's largest would remove the equivalent of one guy's travel emissions for 2 1/2 years..

Big whoop. However...

Carbon capture and storage is favored at some of the highest political levels and will be used by companies that are so big they see the expense required to get to negative emissions as a competitive advantage against smaller competitors who will be crushed by the costs. This is the same approach multinationals take toward regulation: bring it on and bury the little guys.

There are voices in the control-freak wing of the green coalition that are already howling that this technology will allow "business-as-usual" to continue which is a threat to their wannabe power over people and economies. They will probably be bought off.

One last note: the approach that Carbfix uses, solidifying the CO2 is absolutely the way to go versus pumping CO2 gas into disused caverns or oil and gas fields or under the sea.

Although more expensive initially, it eliminates the threat of carbon dioxide belches that could be, not just counterproductive to the storage effort, but physically dangerous to people in the vicinity. See Cameroon's Lake Nyos for an example.

If interested in a few more mentions of Climeworks see also April 2021's
Carbon Capture & Storage: The Current State of Play

December 2023's:
"Here Come the Unicorns of Clean Energy"

It's Redwood that we are interested in. The other three, Climeworks, Solugen and Sila Nanotechnologies may or may not make it but Redwood seems to be a possible fortune builder....

And a couple weeks ago:

Oxford Uni.: "The outlook for CO2 removal"

It is still far too expensive to be more than just demonstration projects, now and for another decade minimum.

And as with all such conversations the promoters never, ever, speak of degrees of warming avoided. If interested see after the jump....

Russia Plans To Grant China Access To The Sea Of Japan

From Nikkei Asia, June 14:

China eyes Sea of Japan access via Russia-North Korea border river

Proposal raises security concerns for Tokyo as Chinese maritime activity ramps up

China, Russia and North Korea are expected to start discussions soon about allowing ships to navigate a border river into the Sea of Japan, which could have major security implications for Tokyo.

The waterway, the Tumen River, flows east along the border of China and North Korea, and eventually also of Russia, before emptying into the Sea of Japan.

Chinese vessels can currently only freely navigate the river until the village of Fangchuan, on the eastern end of landlocked Jilin province. Permission is required from both Russia and North Korea to navigate the remaining 15-kilometer stretch to the Sea of Japan. A Soviet-era, 7-meter-tall bridge also blocks the passage of larger vessels.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin included in a joint statement following a summit last month a mention that the countries will engage in a "constructive dialogue" with North Korea about the Tumen River.

China historically held the area until the Russian Empire took control in the 1860s. China has repeatedly urged Russia and North Korea to allow Chinese vessels to navigate the river to the Sea of Japan, proposing the creation of a special economic zone along its banks.

Russia used to be reluctant on the idea, concerned that it would increase China's influence in Northeast Asia. But its attitude is changing as the power dynamic between Moscow, Beijing and Pyongyang shifts.

Russia has grown increasingly dependent on China for trade amid Western sanctions over its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Energy exports to China have increased since the start of the Ukraine war. Moscow also relies on China for electronic components and automobiles, and imports from China increased to 37% of the total in 2023 from 22% before the war....

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And from Seoul-based NK News, May 24:

Why China wants North Korea and Russia’s help in gaining access to the sea

As we've noted over the years, the Chinese government/party would eventually like to redraw the map of the Russian Far East to look something like this:

 

That is a 2019 New York Times map that we linked in "Siberia As Breadbasket For China":

....China has been eyeing their neighbor to the north based on some revanchist claims to the land for 160 years.
Here is part of the Chinese pitch from a few years ago as verbalized by the New York Times:

...The border, all 2,738 miles of it, is the legacy of the Convention of Peking of 1860 and other unequal pacts between a strong, expanding Russia and a weakened China after the Second Opium War. (Other European powers similarly encroached upon China, but from the south. Hence the former British foothold in Hong Kong, for example.)

The 1.35 billion Chinese people south of the border outnumber Russia’s 144 million almost 10 to 1. The discrepancy is even starker for Siberia on its own, home to barely 38 million people, and especially the border area, where only 6 million Russians face over 90 million Chinese. With intermarriage, trade and investment across that border, Siberians have realized that, for better or for worse, Beijing is a lot closer than Moscow....

—via "Why China will 'reclaim' Siberia", China Daily Mail, July 5, 2014

And although the SCMP's editorial stance usually seems to be pretty much independent of the official Beijing line, the fact the paper is owned by Alibaba means the potential for government pressure should always be factored into stories such as this from the July 20, 2018 edition:

Why forecasts of a Chinese takeover of the Russian Far East are just dramatic myth

Also "The Chinese influx into Asian Russia" and "Residents Of Russian Far East Protest Chinese Presence".

Marc to Market: "Week Ahead: Politics, Economics, and the Yen"

Marc Chandler's weekend post, June 22:

The relationship between interest rate expectations and the foreign exchange levels is more complicated than many textbooks or conventional wisdom allows. Australia's and Norway's central banks pushed against rate cuts this year, and their currencies were rewarded. The Reserve Bank of New Zealand said more or less the same thing, but investors are less sanguine and took the New Zealand dollar down as much as it took the Australian dollar higher. The Bank of Canada is perceived to be one of the most dovish G10 central banks. The market expects at least two more cuts to be delivered this year. Yet, the Canadian dollar was the third strongest G10 currency last week, appreciating by about 0.2% for the second consecutive week. That the Swiss franc was weak, losing 0.4%, is understandable after the SNB surprised many with its second rate cut.

The yen is the outlier. It will take a seven-day losing streak into next week, during which it has fallen by almost 1.8%. This run lifted the greenback to almost JPY159.65, its highest level since the intervention at the end of April, when it briefly traded above JPY160. The US 10-year yield has risen by a couple of basis points during the currency streak. Governor Ueda has explicitly not ruled out a rate hike next month alongside decision on reducing bond purchases (the start of QT), but the market has become less convinced of a rate hike, and the problems at Norinchukin Bank (saying it would have to sell $63 bln of low-yielding US and European government bonds) pushes them in the same direction. The losses the firm projects for this fiscal year more than tripled (to ~$9.5 bln) from an estimate made less than a bond ago. The US Treasury put Japan on its "watch list” for the rise in its exports (though it still runs a trade deficit) and the growing current account surplus (which is driven by capital flows that are flattered in yen terms given its depreciation). Some think this makes intervention less likely.

The markets remain politically charged. The US will see its first presidential debate, but European politics overshadow it. In the next fortnight, the European Union will have a new executive arm, though it has not stopped the outgoing one to announce tariffs on Chinese-produced EVs and from initiating "excessive deficit procedures" against several members. The two big parties in the EU, the center-left and center-right will likely reach out to the Greens, who have not held an EC post before, rather than turn to Meloni's faction. In France, the middle has been eroded but neither the left nor right alliance looks to win outright. In the UK, recent polls warn Prime Minister Sunak may lose his seat, and Labour could see the largest majority in a couple generations.....

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Meanwhile in Italy: "A Clean, Green Way to Recycle Solar Panels"

Recycling wind turbine blades and solar panels is getting more and more important with every renewable installation announced.

From IEEE Spectrum, June 17:

See how this Italian startup recovers valuable materials without toxic chemicals

Inside a shipping container in an industrial area of Venice, the Italian startup 9-Tech is taking a crack at a looming global problem: how to responsibly recycle the 54 million to 160 million tonnes of solar modules that are expected to reach the end of their productive lives by 2050. Recovering the materials won’t be easy. Solar panels are built to withstand any environment on Earth for 20 to 30 years, and even after sitting in the sun for three decades, the hardware is difficult to dismantle. In fact, most recycling facilities trash the silicon, silver, and copper—the most valuable but least accessible materials in old solar panels—and recover only the aluminum frames and glass panes. 

The need for recycling will only grow as the world increasingly deploys solar power. More than 1.2 terawatts of solar power has already been deployed globally. Solar panels are currently being distributed at a rate of more than 400 gigawatts per year, and the rate is expected to increase to a whopping 3 TW per year by 2030, according to a literature analysis by researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

In an attempt to stop a mountain of photovoltaic garbage from accumulating, researchers are pursuing better recycling methods. The most advanced methods proposed so far can recover at least 90 percent of the copper, silver, silicon, glass, and aluminum in a crystalline silicon PV module. But these processes are expensive and often involve toxic chemicals. No recycling method has proven to be as cheap as landfilling, and very few operate on an industrial scale, says Garvin Heath, principal environmental engineer at NREL, who manages a group of international experts assigned by the International Energy Agency to analyze PV sustainability.

The founders of 9-Tech say they have a better way. Their process is a noisy one involving a combustion furnace, an ultrasound bath, and mechanical sorting, the vibrations of which shake the floor of the modest freight container where they have been testing their operation for nearly two years. The company uses no toxic chemicals, releases no pollutants into the environment, and recovers up to 90 percent of the materials in a solar panel, says Francesco Miserocchi, chief technology officer at 9-Tech....

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Now, on to the cadmium-telluride in First Solar's panels. Via Elsevier's ScienceDirect, June 2024

CdTe photovoltaic technology: An overview of waste generation, recycling, and raw material demand

Modern Merchandising: "Walmart Plans to Launch Digital Shelf Tags..."; "Amazon gets FAA approval to expand drone deliveries" AMZN; WMT)

 First up, from PC Magazine, June 19:

Walmart plans to replace traditional price stickers with electric shelf labels. 

Once installed, the price tags will allow the store to change the price on items as frequently as every 10 seconds. That means a store could make the call to drop the price of a product that’s expected to expire soon or raise the cost of a high-demand item with the click of a button.

Walmart has been testing the technology at its store in Grapevine, Texas, and plans to roll out digital shelf labels (DSLs) to 2,300 stores by the end of 2026. The change represents a significant shift in how store associates manage pricing, inventory, order fulfillment, and customer interactions, Walmart says.

The digital tags reduce the amount of time associates need to spend walking the floor to change paper tags by hand. In the test store, they’ve increased productivity and simplified stock replenishment, ultimately allowing for things to happen faster but also with less staff....

....MORE

And at Axios, May 30: 

The Federal Aviation Administration has authorized Amazon's delivery drones to fly longer distances without visual spotters, a key hurdle that will allow the retailer to expand its fledgling Prime Air service.

Why it matters: Amazon's goal is to deliver 500 million packages a year by drone by 2029. But first, it had to satisfy government regulators that it could fly safely in increasingly crowded skies.

Zoom in: The company said it spent years developing proprietary "detect-and-avoid" technology.

• The drones' computer vision system includes a series of cameras that scan the skies while in flight, and then check the ground during deliveries to avoid people, animals and other obstacles.
• Amazon successfully validated the system in the presence of FAA inspectors to show that its drones can safely navigate away from planes, helicopters and even hot air balloons.

What's next: Now that it has FAA approval to fly "beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS)," Amazon says it will begin scaling drone delivery service to more customers.

• First, it will start delivering to more densely populated areas of College Station, Texas (one of its initial test markets)....

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"Why Steve Wozniak Dismissed PCs and Steve Jobs Didn't"

From Pessimists Archive, May 6:

In March 1976 Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak presented a circuit board design for a home PC at the now legendary ‘Homebrew Computer Club’ - a meeting of early personal computing pioneers.

In attendance was a young Steve Jobs who - so struck by the projects potential - convinced Wozniak to keep the designs private and co-found Apple to commercialize them. The rest was history.

Often forgotten in this Silicon Valley legend was the doubt one of the Steve’s (Steve Wozniak) cast on the very idea of personal computing, just as the companies magnum opus - the Macintosh - had been released to the world.

In a 1985 interview Wozniak posited: “The home computer may be going the way of video games, which are a dying fad” - alluding to the 1983 crash in the video game market. Wozniak continued:

“for most personal tasks, such as balancing a check book, consulting airline schedules, writing a modest number of letters, paper works just as well as a computer, and costs less.”

Even in the realm of education Wozniak doubted the value of computers, saying that after leaving Apple and enrolling in college: "

I spent all my time using the computer, not learning the subject I was supposed to learn. I was just as efficient when I used a typewriter."

He seemed well aware of the heretical nature of his statements, telling a reporter: “Nobody at Apple is going to like hearing this, but as a general device for everyone, computers have been oversold” and that “Steve Jobs is going to kill me when he hears that.”

Many of his critiques were not uncommon: the same year The New York Times ran a story titled 'Home Computer is Out in the Cold' exploring the failed promise of computers becoming as ubiquitous as television and dishwashers in the home. In the piece Silicon Valley luminary Esther Dyson joked “What the world needs is a home computer that does windows” - she meant housework, not the operating system that would launch 8-months later....

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"The Enduring Mystery of How Water Freezes"

Isaac Asimov was intrigued as all-get-out by water. More after the jump.

From Quanta magazine, June 17:

Making ice requires more than subzero temperatures. The unpredictable process takes microscopic scaffolding, random jiggling and often a little bit of bacteria.

We learn in grade school that water freezes at zero degrees Celsius, but that’s seldom true. In clouds, scientists have found supercooled water droplets as chilly as minus 40 C, and in a lab in 2014, they cooled water to a staggering minus 46 C before it froze. You can supercool water at home: Throw a bottle of distilled water in your freezer, and it’s unlikely to crystallize until you shake it.

Freezing usually doesn’t happen right at zero degrees for much the same reason that backyard wood piles don’t spontaneously combust. To get started, fire needs a spark. And ice needs a nucleus — a seed of ice around which more and more water molecules arrange themselves into a crystal structure.

The formation of these seeds is called ice nucleation. Nucleation is so slow for pure water at zero degrees that it might as well not happen at all. But in nature, impurities provide surfaces for nucleation, and these impurities can drastically change how quickly and at what temperature ice forms.

For a process that’s anything but exotic, ice nucleation remains surprisingly mysterious. Chemists can’t reliably predict the effect of a given impurity or surface, let alone design one to hinder or promote ice formation. But they’re chipping away at the problem. They’re building computer models that can accurately simulate water’s behavior, and they’re looking to nature for clues — proteins made by bacteria and fungi are the best ice makers scientists know of.

Understanding how ice forms is more than an academic exercise. Motes of material create ice seeds in clouds, which lead to most of the precipitation that falls to Earth as snow and rain. Several dry Western states use ice-nucleating materials to promote precipitation, and U.S. government agencies including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Air Force have experimented with ice nucleation for drought relief or as a war tactic. (Perhaps snowstorms could waylay the enemy.) And in some countries, hail-fighting planes dust clouds with silver iodide, a substance that helps small droplets to freeze, hindering the growth of large hailstones.

But there’s still much to learn. “Everyone agrees that ice forms,” said Valeria Molinero, a physical chemist at the University of Utah who builds computer simulations of water. “After that, there are questions.”

Freezing Water
What’s special about zero degrees is that, at or below this temperature, it makes energetic sense for water to turn from liquid into ice. Below that threshold, ice’s crystal structure has a lower energy than sloshing water molecules. The process of freezing water actually releases heat, which is why you can use an infrared camera to see ice heat up as it solidifies....

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Isaac Asimov made appearances in a few posts. Here are two from 2020-21:  

"Why Wall Street investors’ trading California water futures is nothing to fear – and unlikely to work anyway"

I don't know. Anything that normalizes the commodification of water, that, rather than exalting it as a giver of life (and one of the weirdest compounds in the universe) reduces it to just another thing to trade, brings us closer to the day when pure power politics forces the U.S. to drain the Great Lakes just to keep Phoenix and Las Vegas and Los Angeles going.

Or something....

*****

...Of course Issac Asimov had to go and pop my quasi-mystical water balloon. In one of Asimov's riffs on water, "Not as We Know it: The Chemistry of Life" he uses this little paragraph as a jumping-off point:

Water is an amazing substance with a whole set of unusual properties which are ideal for life-as-we-know-it. So well fitted for life is it, in fact, that some people have seen in the nature of water a sure sign of Divine providence. This, however, is a false argument, since life has evolved to fit the watery medium in which it developed. Life fits water, rather than the reverse.

From our December 2020 post "Hydrogen Storage: A New Form Of Ice":

The science fiction writer Isaac Asimov was also a trained chemist: PhD, Columbia, post doc, taught biochem at Boston Uni's Med school etc.

And he was fascinated by water. See after the jump.....

Related:
Water and Its Mysterie

Our Man in Fotheringhay—Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration"

From Literary Review, June 2024:

In the 17th century, the Uffizi offered its visitors a rather more diverse range of exhibits than it does now, among them weapons made by some distant precursor of Q Branch. The Scottish traveller James Fraser on a visit to Florence in the 1650s recorded what he saw: ‘A rarity, five pistol barrels joined together to be put in your hat, which is discharged at once as you salute your enemy & bid him farewell … another pistol with eighteen barrels in it to be shot desperately and scatter through a room as you enter.’

It is not possible to go very far in the divided Europe of the early modern period without coming across some instance of the many kinds of covert activity that are chronicled in this genial and immensely readable work. The spirit of the age is captured in an extraordinary line in the poem ‘Character of an Ambassador’ by the Dutch polymath and diplomat Constantijn Huygens, which says that ambassadors are ‘honourable spies’. An unexpected page in Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman’s book is devoted to invisible inks in the family papers of a Lancashire Catholic squire. The authors also turn their attention to the texts and objects that left Fotheringhay Castle covertly, despite the best efforts of the jailers of Mary, Queen of Scots. One such, a miniature gold and enamel triptych, is the pride of my college’s collection (you can see it in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, where it is on loan). The noblewoman Anne Vaux, who smuggled it out of the castle, features in Spycraft as the victim of an audacious and perfectly executed sting by the lieutenant of the Tower of London, where her friend Henry Garnett, a Jesuit priest, was imprisoned. They corresponded in invisible inks on papers wrapped round a (hint!) pair of spectacles or pieces of ‘bisket bread’, little realising that all their communications were being intercepted, the invisible inks being made legible and every letter (including seals, handwriting and invisible messages) being replaced by a counterfeit made by the master forger Arthur Gregory. 

The authors naturally examine the fight to the death between Mary and Elizabeth I’s spymaster Francis Walsingham, ‘one of the most famous cipher-driven episodes in history’. The first round of their bout, involving the incriminating ‘casket letters’, was already in the past. The final struggle drew in Walsingham’s double agent Gilbert Gifford (who made sure that his master saw Mary’s letters before her ally the French ambassador did), Walsingham’s decipherer Thomas Phelippes, and Mary’s cipher secretaries Gilbert Curle and Claude Nau. Phelippes, thanks to an earlier search of the queen’s rooms, had the cipher key in his possession. He had only to decipher Mary’s letters at top speed and bide his time. On the packet containing the final incriminating letter he drew a gallows to indicate the likely fate of his rival cryptographers....

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"The Fastest Path to African Prosperity "

 We've looked at the issue from a few different angles including the despondent "IMF: Sub-Saharan Africa has Just Completed One of its Best Decades of Growth--It's Not Enough (UPDATED)" to the aspirational "Up to 500 Million Sub-Saharan Africans Would Like to Move to Europe; Mayfair, Monte Carlo Favored"

What most of our posts had in common, spoken and unspoken were "The Looting Machines of Africa" and "Needed: 800 Million Jobs For Africa"*:

By now most of our readers have seen a version of the U.N. projections for world population in 2050 and 2100. If not, here's a post from April with the graphic:

This may be one of the more important graphics you are likely to come across today.
Africa's population is projected by the United Nations to reach 2 billion people by 2045, 4 billion before the end of the century:

via CityLab

We followed up with "To Jumpstart Development, Should We Give Africa Bonds a Whirl?"

The problem, as always, is keeping the money from sticking to the hands of the kleptocrats,
And whether investment will actually do any good.

Following on "IMF: Sub-Saharan Africa has Just Completed One of its Best Decades of Growth--It's Not Enough" here are a couple women who have thought about this stuff, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala a former two-time Finance Minister of Nigeria and World Bank Managing Director, currently a senior advisor at Lazard and Nancy Birdsall, former EVP at the Inter-American Development Bank where she ran a $30 billion loan portfolio....

And today's headliner from Palladium magazine, June 7:

This article is based on a white paper published by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.

The scale of the challenge in fostering a prosperous African continent is daunting. Africa remains the poorest region in the world, with the extreme poverty rate in sub-Saharan Africa in 2015 standing at 41%, significantly higher than the global average of 10%. The World Bank also estimates that over half the world’s extreme poor reside in sub-Saharan Africa, with a total of 413 million people living in extreme poverty. Most of the world’s poorest nations are in Africa, including Burundi, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Malawi, Niger, Mozambique, Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone. Indicators of human welfare, including life expectancy, child mortality, access to education or electricity, and much more, all tell a similar story.

Strikingly, these patterns are discernable too in the arena of business and enterprise. Africa’s share of global merchandise exports stands at 2.5%. In 2017, only 43% of adults in sub-Saharan Africa had a bank account. Sadly, these percentages are not surprising in a region where property rights are inconsistently protected and rule of law may be weak or missing altogether, but regulatory obstacles are nonetheless substantial. By multiple metrics, including the Doing Business Index and both the Fraser and Heritage Economic Freedom Indices, most African nations rank among the worst in the world.

Many would view these statistics as evidence of poor human empowerment, proposing improved education systems for the next generation. However, Africa is by far the youngest region of the world, yet it has high levels of youth unemployment among both educated and uneducated Africans. This fact alone should alert people to the fact that more education is not a solution to the youth unemployment problem in Africa. Africans often joke that the first job for a Ph.D. is taxi driver. Shockingly, almost 50% of students with some tertiary education are unemployed in resource-rich nations.

Moreover, the definition of “unemployment” significantly over-counts those in dissatisfaction with part-time work. Such statistical analysis also fails to capture the reality of poorer nations, as they count those “searching” for work, and fail to recognize that the majority of people are either engaged in agricultural labor, resource extraction, or are “hustling,” doing whatever they can to bring in money—selling on the street, in the market, begging, prostitution, and so forth. Thus, the number of under-employed are much higher than those who are officially counted as “unemployed.”

The belief that increasing educational provision is the key to unlocking prosperity in Africa is therefore incorrect. African economies instead need market opportunities to make use of their abundant human capital, especially those who are highly educated but remain unemployed. The scale of the challenge is immense: the working-age sub-Saharan African population numbered 587 million six years ago, in 2018, and has been increasing by 20 million every year since. Of that total, 200 million are between the ages of 15-24, a proportion that will only very gradually decline over the next decades as Africa begins its demographic shift towards fewer children. How can Africa create hundreds of millions of good jobs in the coming decades?....

....MUCH MORE

If interested see also:
September 2018
Robots and automation: it will be cheaper to operate robots in US factories than hire workers in Africa

August 2019
Zombiescapes Africa's Mega-City Addiction

Sometime this year Kinshasa DRC will pass Paris as the largest Francophone city in the world.
And sometime in the 2020's Abidjan, Ivory Coast will do so as well.

We're talking big cities.

And though they don't speak French, the citizens of Lagos live in a city of 24 million people, as large as Kinshasa and Abidjan combined.
With room for Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse and Nice as well.
Big.

February 2020
Why Africa Has Found It So Difficult To Industrialize

There are development experts who believe it is already too late for Africa to industrialize, that the model which allowed Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, China and Singapore to escape the poverty trap may never happen again and the experts could be right.
On the other hand the Wuhan coronavirus may be offering one last opportunity for Africa to become part of worldwide supply chains at a level other than that of the extractive industries....

June 2021
"Three reasons to be worried about Africa’s progress"
*July 2022
United Nations: "2022 Revision of World Population Prospects"

November 2022
"Megalopolis: how coastal west Africa will shape the coming century"
As the old-timers used to say, "Pay attention or pay the offer."

As noted above, we've looked at this from a few different angles. 

Possibly related:

• "J.P. Morgan is deploying photos of sausages to lure staff to Frankfurt"
• Prospect List: "Africa May Have Up to 200 Hidden Billionaires, Mobius Says"