"Will AI Generate a New Schumpeterian Growth Wave?"

That's what a lot of people including yours truly are counting on. 

If it doesn't happen, the human population could face real problems, far beyond simple economic stagnation.

From American Affairs Journal, Winter 2024:

Fifty years after Intel launched the microprocessor (1971) and Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer published the recombinant-DNA mechanism (1973) at the heart of “Biotech 1.0,” the age of cheap computing, expensive biosimilar drugs, and genetically modified organ­isms is coming to a close. What new general-purpose technologies might replace these engines of growth? What kinds of social and political arrangements will support or impede the emergence and deployment of those new technologies?

That we stand in the midst of a geoeconomic and geopolitical inflection point is increasingly clear, but as Walter Benjamin said, the angel of history always looks backwards. Not being angels, we lean on our asset management expertise to take the riskier path of looking forward and sketching some possible scenarios for the post-inflection future. Doing so requires outlining growth waves in capitalist economies, first generally, and then specifically for the information and communications technology (ICT) plus biotech 1.0 growth wave to understand how an internal process of decay exhausted that wave, creating the forces generating the current inflection point. This clears the way to look at a potential new package of general-purpose technologies, why those technologies and organizational formats look like solutions to current problems, and how they might get married to emerging forms of corporate and social organization. We end with three scenarios for the future. Place your bets.

Growth Waves in Economic History

Joseph Schumpeter famously argued (and contemporary neo-Schumpe­t­erians like Carlota Perez maintain) that orthodox economics gets things wrong by focusing on equilibrium models (as in the Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium models most macroeconomics deploys) and on exchange rather than on production. Instead, Schumpeterians view capitalism as a dynamic process that never attains equilibrium. More­over, revolutions in produc­tive technologies that create eras of relatively fast growth and then stagnation characterize capitalism more so than equilibrium. These technologies emerge as a package of investment-driven changes to how things are made, moved, and marketed.

Schumpeter identified four periods of rapid growth characterized by six big technological developments: (1) A new source of cheap energy, as with coal in the mid- to late nineteenth century or oil in the mid-twentieth century. (2) A new production process based on a new gen­eral‑purpose technology, as with continuous flow production, and then continuous flow assembly line production using electrically pow­ered equipment. (3) New investment or mass consumption goods, as with steel and then standardized consumer durables. (4) A new mode of transportation, as with steel steamships and bicycles, and then automobiles and aircraft. (5) A new form of corporate organization, as with the proliferation of vertically integrated firms with ownership divorced from management and then Alfred Chandler’s “M-form”¹ multidivisional firm; related to that, new modes for financing investment. (6) Less salient in Schumpeter but nonetheless very important, as Perez has argued, new modes of social and economic governance to balance supply and demand, as with early twentieth-century cartels and then the post-1945 “Keynesian welfare states.”²

Perez expands Schumpeter’s “made, moved, and marketed” growth wave model by adding in “macro-managing” and “mindset”—that is, social dimensions like the congealing of common sense around “best production practices,” corporate organization, financing, lifestyles, and macroeconomic management. She calls the resulting package—making, moving, marketing, macro-managing, and mindset—a “techno-econom­ic paradigm.” Each new techno-economic paradigm mani­fests as rapidly expanding firms, whose investments and increased sales drive economic growth, until stagnation and decline eventually set in.

Consider the entire package of petroleum-fueled, mass-produced automobiles or consumer durables more generally (in Schumpeter’s fourth growth wave), or ICT and biotech 1.0 (in what Perez identifies as our fifth, contemporary wave). Looking at things this way divides economic growth since 1800 into six identifiable eras based on both hard and social technologies, which figure 1 displays.

The fifth, current techno-economic paradigm began in 1971 with Intel’s first microprocessor, though computing would take decades to achieve macro significance. The consistently falling costs of semiconductors opened up increasingly vast fields for the computing, electronics, and software industries. The chemical engineering skills of the electronics, and specifically semiconductor, industry also fed into the pharma sector’s role in growth over this period. The exemplary consumer product of this era is the smartphone, which combines all prior major electronics, communications, and computing equipment into one de­vice.³ The Cohen and Boyer recombinant DNA process also opened up an era of bioengineering, replacing traditional drug research and plant breeding or hybridization methods with a relatively more targeted manipulation of genomes. Boyer would later help found Genentech, the first of a wave of new biotech firms in the pharmaceutical and agricultural space. Here, exemplary products were human insulin and herbicide‑resistant soybeans.

As Max Weber might put it, these technologies were ethically neutral. What was crucial was the new form of corporate organization wrapped around these technologies, because that drove growth while changing the distribution of income and production globally. U.S. courts and Congress, pressured by litigants in the new knowledge sectors (and some old sectors, such as hospitality), generated a series of changes in U.S. law around vertical ties and intellectual property (IP) rights. The Reagan administration’s weakening of protections for unions and legal victories for the International Franchise Association were inte­gral to the development of the current paradigm.⁴ Changes to American franchise law meant that leading firms exercising high levels of control over their various suppliers would no longer be ruled illegal on antitrust grounds. The application of IP law to software, more robust trademark protection, extended copyright lengths, and the export of U.S. IP legal protection to other economies through trade deals also underpinned the success of corporate strategies focused on generating profit from IP ownership.

Franchises became the dominant form of corporate organization in this era. The old, vertically integrated firm structure gave way to a de jure vertically disintegrated tripartite structure that could take domestic or global expression. Three types of firms populated that structure. Lead firms, which often exercised de facto control over the entire chain, pos­sessed significant human capital in a relatively small number of (highly compensated) employees, and used them to generate a colossal IP port­folio.⁵ These firms then outsourced much of their production to two kinds of firms: second-layer firms, which are more capital-intensive, and third-layer firms, which are labor-intensive and produce undifferentiated goods and services....

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"Vaclav Smil and the Value of Doubt"

Since this piece was written, Professor Smil has come out with another book and for the first time I can recall he's getting panned. Of course the "mehs" are from the popular press so it might just be a change in what is fashionable. More after the jump.

From The New Yorker, February 20, 2024:

A ruthless dissector of unwarranted assumptions takes on environmental catastrophists and techno-optimists.

ot long ago, I randomly opened Vaclav Smil’s recent book “Size: How It Explains the World.” The first paragraph I read, in a chapter about good and bad design, concerned rubber flip-flops, which Smil described as among the world’s most widely owned individual possessions even though “they provide neither good lateral support nor basic vertical stability.” The following paragraph, about furniture, mentioned “the steadily diminishing share of the rich world’s population that grows food, catches fish, cuts wood, mines minerals and builds structures.” The next touched on religious pilgrimages, airports, and commuting to work. In 2018, Elizabeth Wilson, who is the founding director of the Arthur L. Irving Institute for Energy and Society at Dartmouth, told Science, “You could take a paragraph from one of his books and make a whole career out of it.”

Smil is an emeritus professor of environmental studies at the University of Manitoba, in Winnipeg. He is best known for his writing about global issues, among them energy, agriculture, population, economics, and climate. He has served as a consultant with the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and other institutions. His scholarly interests are eclectic, and he is prolific. “Size,” which was published last May, is not his most recent book; the second edition of “Materials and Dematerialization,” which was first published a decade ago as “Making the Modern World,” came out a month later. Altogether, by his count, he has published forty-eight, beginning with “China’s Energy: Achievements, Problems, Prospects,” in 1976. He has four more under way: one about globalization, one about food, a “Size”-like study of speed, and a combined reissue, by Oxford University Press, of two earlier books, which examine the years between 1867 and 1914, the period that he believes did more than any other to shape the modern world. His books typically begin at a trot and maintain the same daydream-defying pace until the final paragraph. The fifth chapter of “Size” includes a detailed critique, with formulas, of what he identifies as the impossible proportions of various characters in “Gulliver’s Travels”: “Properly scaled, an adult Lilliputian would thus have a body mass more than 10 times larger than Swift’s erroneous attribution, and instead of being equivalent to a tiny shrew he would be more like an eastern gray squirrel.” Smil has a sense of humor, but he uses it sparingly; even passages that seem at first to be personal or anecdotal sometimes turn out to be footnoted.

Smil is a ruthless dissector of what he believes to be unwarranted assumptions, and not just those of eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish satirical novelists. The first book of his that I read, twenty years ago, was “Energy at the Crossroads,” published by the M.I.T. Press, in which he wrote that the power under the direct control of an affluent American household, including its vehicles, “would have been available only to a Roman latifundia owner of about 6,000 strong slaves, or to a nineteenth-century landlord employing 3,000 workers and 400 big draft horses.” He was making a characteristically vivid point about the impact of modern access to energy, most of it produced by burning fossil fuels. No one can doubt that twenty-first-century Americans’ lives are easier, healthier, longer, and more mobile than the lives of our ancestors, but Smil’s comparison makes it clear that most of us underestimate, by orders of magnitude, the scale of the energy transformations that have made our comforts possible.

More recently, Smil has written about ongoing efforts to address climate change, and about the feasibility of achieving “net zero” by 2050. In “How the World Really Works,” published in 2022, he writes that, in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, “despite extensive and expensive expansion of renewable energies, the share of fossil fuels in the world’s primary energy supply fell only marginally”—from eighty-six per cent to eighty-two per cent—and that, during the same period, global consumption of fossil fuels actually increased, by forty-five per cent. Those numbers surprise people whose sense of environmental progress is shaped by car commercials and by news stories about breakthroughs in solar panels, algae-based fuels, and organisms that turn carbon dioxide into stone. They also annoy environmentalists who view Smil’s observations as backward-looking and counterproductive, and they contribute to what one journalist described to me recently as Smil’s reputation as “a sourpuss.”

Smil dislikes giving interviews. He believes that his books contain everything that anyone needs to know about him, and he told me that he had agreed to be profiled in Science, in 2018, only as a favor to his publisher—a gesture he later regretted. When I approached him about this article, I did so with trepidation. We exchanged e-mails almost daily for most of a month, and we had a lengthy telephone conversation. But when I suggested meeting in person, he replied, “As for flying to Manitoba, nobody ever does that (much like nobody ever flies to Topeka).” A quality that runs through all his writing, and that I find both appealing and challenging, is his stubborn skepticism. Toward the end of “How the World Really Works,” he quotes a line, usually attributed to Descartes, that could serve as his own guiding principle: de omnibus dubitandum. Doubt everything.

Smil was born in 1943 in what today is the Czech Republic but at the time was the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, which the Nazis had established after invading four years earlier. He deflected my questions about his upbringing other than to say that his childhood,“if a label has to be chosen,” was “normal and happy.” Between 1960 and 1965, he was a student at Charles University, in Prague. He described his student years and the ones immediately following them as “a long prelude to the Prague Spring of 1968.” The Prague Spring was a period of liberalization that began with Alexander Dubček’s election as the head of the country’s Communist Party, on January 5th, and ended, seven and a half months later, with a full-scale invasion by Soviet bloc soldiers and tanks. Until the Soviets intervened, Smil said, “even ordinary students could access Western papers and journals in the university library.” He studied a broad range of topics related to energy, among them biology, geology, meteorology, demography, economics, and statistics. The subject of his undergraduate thesis was “the environmental impacts of coal-fired electricity generation, particularly the effects of air pollution.” His scholarly skepticism, he said, came to him naturally, beginning when he was a teen-ager, and was “mightily reinforced by getting trained as an old-fashioned scientist (in what the Germans call in one of their beloved compounds Naturwissenschaften) beholden to demonstrable realities, strengthened daily by living (until 1969) under the Commies (with their endless lies about everything).”

Smil met his wife while both were students, she in medical school. Like thousands of other Czechs, they fled the country before travel restrictions made emigration virtually impossible. They arrived in the United States on August 31, 1969, and he spent two years earning a doctorate, in the geography department at Penn State. (The subject of his dissertation was global energy development.) In 1972, the University of Manitoba offered him a job, and he took it. He is fluent in four languages and has studied half a dozen others. His recent reading, he told me, has included Mandelstam and Pasternak in Russian, and the New Testament in Latin. His English is excellent but accented, and he speaks it even faster than he writes—so fast that there were parts of our telephone conversation that I didn’t understand until I had listened to a recording with the speed reduced by twenty-five per cent.

A dozen years ago, I interviewed a highly regarded chemistry professor at a major American university. He surprised me by saying that his job forced him to spend so much time travelling that he had the same better-than-first-class status on American Airlines that the character played by George Clooney has in the 2009 movie “Up in the Air.” He needed to travel, he explained, because in many ways the most important and time-consuming part of his job was soliciting funding, all over the world, for the research that his graduate students performed in his lab. When I mentioned this to Smil, he said that what I had described was the modern ideal of the scientist, “just flying around, drumming up monies,” and that he detested it. He has never relied on grad students. “I used to run madly among libraries,” he said, but he now makes heavy use of online resources, among them the Web of Science, to which the university still gives him access, and Gallica, a multicentury digital archive created by the National Library of France. He loves classical music, but is “absolutely tone-deaf” and plays no instruments. He has a good memory for big numbers and can do many calculations in his head. His ideas come to him, he said, when he walks, reads, wakes up in the morning, sits on airplanes, or cooks, including favorite Japanese dishes. (He began visiting Japan in 1978, and co-wrote a book about the evolution of the modern Japanese diet). “I just write my books, much as a plumber fixes pipes and garbagemen haul away junk,” he said. “I mean it, no introspection; it is just a kind of work I like and can do.”

Smil has written a great deal about renewable-energy technologies, and he has said that their implementation cannot continue to grow quickly enough to fully negate the global increase in over-all energy demand during the next two or three decades. Unrealistic expectations for such technologies, he has written, arise in part from inappropriate extrapolation from the extraordinarily fast and sustained evolution of solid-state electronics, beginning, roughly seventy-five years ago, with the invention of the transistor. In 1965, Gordon Moore—later a co-founder of Intel—observed that the number of components that could be etched on a single microchip doubled roughly every two years. The number of such components grew from a few thousand in the nineteen-seventies to tens of billions today, a phenomenon that’s often referred to as Moore’s Law. Even for microchips, that rate may be slackening, but its application in most other areas has always been problematic. In “Invention and Innovation,” which M.I.T. published last year, Smil writes, “We are told that rapid exponential growth, driven by digitization and advances in AI, already prevails in such fields as solar cells, batteries, electric cars, and even urban farming.” Such growth, where it actually does exist, can’t continue permanently, he argues. Belief that it can, in his view, is consistent with what he described to me as “America’s Barnumian approach to science and innovation, where every dubious claim is treated as ‘transformative change’ and where every patently impossible promise”—nuclear fusion, high-temperature superconductivity, the colonization of Mars—“is worshipped as another effusion of history’s most brilliant minds.”

In “Growth,” which M.I.T. published, in 2019, Smil takes the same expansive approach to his subject that he does in “Size”—the subtitle is “From Microorganisms to Megacities”—but he does so in smaller type and at almost double the page count. In a brief review in Foreign Policy, Keith Johnson wrote that “the best way to appreciate Vaclav Smil’s latest doorstopper is to take a deep breath, walk across the room, and pick up the book from wherever it landed after being tossed away for the umpteenth time as impenetrable, incomprehensible mush.” But Johnson did pick it up, and, in the next paragraph of his review, he describes “Growth” as “fascinating, compelling—and ultimately convincing.”

In the book’s preface, Smil writes that most growth processes—“of organisms, artifacts, or complex systems”—can be plotted on a so-called S-shaped, or sigmoid, growth curve, meaning that the rate of change increases slowly at first, then increases rapidly, then levels off. An error that humans make with similarly predictable regularity is to assume that the nearly vertical middle segment of an S-shaped curve can continue at that angle indefinitely (the price of Dutch tulips in the seventeenth century, the price of bitcoin in the twenty-first). One of his conclusions is that the steady, unceasing economic expansion that economists and politicians dream of is not sustainable, and that the relentless pursuit of growth is environmentally disastrous. Smil has often said that he doesn’t make forecasts—“a pathetically and inexorably ever-failing endeavor on any level,” he told me—but predictions of a kind are implicit in much of his work. In “Growth” ’s coda, he writes, “Continuous material growth, based on ever greater extraction of the Earth’s inorganic and organic resources and on increased degradation of the biosphere’s finite stocks and services, is impossible”—a principle that, in various forms, animates almost all his work, beginning with his undergraduate thesis.

This framework explains why Smil is deeply skeptical about what he views as unrealistic climate goals. He writes, “The predilection of grand global meetings (as well as of national strategies) to set decarbonization targets at years ending in zero or five (45 percent less carbon by 2030 globally; no carbon emissions from US electricity generation by 2035; net zero carbon globally by 2050) is an obviously arbitrary exercise and meeting these goals would require extraordinary technical and economic transformation on the global scale”—a transformation that the world ultimately must make, he believes, but that cannot be achieved within the time frames now commonly predicted for it. The multinational agreement that was reached in December at COP28—the twenty-eighth annual climate-change conference conducted by the United Nations—has been described as mildly encouraging, but viewing its adoption as a watershed moment requires a heroic suspension of disbelief, and not only because the United Arab Emirates, which hosted the meeting, has almost tripled its electricity consumption since 2000 and still produces by far the largest portion of it by burning natural gas and oil....

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And on the new book, "How to Feed the World", Viking Penguin 2024, we see:

NewScientist - Vaclav Smil's take on how to feed future populations has one big flaw, 20 November 2024

Financial Times - How to Feed the World — environmental food for thought, November 28

Telegraph - Vaclav Smil’s guide to the food system, How to Feed the World, has impressive data and range, but it suffers from a dearth of firm ideas, 30 October

Media: "Googling Is for Old People. That’s a Problem for Google." (GOOG)

The sting is in the tail.

From the Wall Street Journal via MSN, November 29:

If Google were a ship, it would be the Titanic in the hours before it struck an iceberg—riding high, supposedly unsinkable, and about to encounter a force of nature that could make its name synonymous with catastrophe.

The trends moving against Google are so numerous and interrelated that the Justice Department’s attempt to dismantle the company—the specifics of which were unveiled Nov. 20—could be the least of its problems.

The company’s core business is under siege. People are increasingly getting answers from artificial intelligence. Younger generations are using other platforms to gather information. And the quality of the results delivered by its search engine is deteriorating as the web is flooded with AI-generated content. Taken together, these forces could lead to long-term decline in Google search traffic, and the outsize profits generated from it, which prop up its parent company Alphabet’s money-losing bets on things like its Waymo self-driving unit.

The first danger facing Google is clear and present: When people want to search for information or go shopping on the internet, they are shifting to Google’s competitors, and advertising dollars are following them. In 2025, eMarketer projects, Google’s share of the U.S. search-advertising market will fall below 50% for the first time since the company began tracking it.

In responding to government antitrust inquiries, Google itself makes this point often: “Evidence at trial shows we face fierce competition from a broad range of competitors.”

This shift is due largely to users’ bypassing Google to start their search for goods on Amazon. It’s handing Amazon billions in advertiser dollars. Meanwhile, TikTok has less than 4% of U.S. digital ad revenue, but significant potential to expand its share of the pie. A recent TikTok pitch to advertisers reported on by The Wall Street Journal said that 23% of its users searched for something within 30 seconds of opening the app, and its global search volume was three billion a day.

The second threat is the rise of “answer engines” like Perplexity which, well, do what they say on the tin. OpenAI has added internet search to ChatGPT, Meta Platforms is exploring building its own search engine, and even AI chatbots that can’t search the internet are proving increasingly capable at addressing many questions. They’re also becoming ever more widespread, as Microsoft and Apple integrate them directly into the operating systems of all the devices they make or support.

“Google had this seemingly insurmountable position in search, until AI came around, and now AI is to search what e-commerce was to Walmart,” says Melissa Schilling, a professor of management at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Another comparable moment was when Microsoft missed the importance of the smartphone, and the iPhone upended its dominance of consumer computing, she adds.

Of course, Google is hard at work trying to make sure that if anyone is going to disrupt the search paradigm with AI, it’s Google itself. Earlier this year, Google rolled out AI summaries of its own search results to all users in the U.S. The company has said that such innovation is in direct response to intense competition from AI at both startups and tech giants.

The third trend that threatens Google is one the company may not be able to do much about, and that makes it the most dangerous—the degradation of the overall ecosystem of websites that Google has shaped, and on which it depends.

Much has been said about how search results are declining overall, no matter how we search the web, because of the proliferation of AI-generated content. Absent any other trends, this would by itself be a huge problem for Google. But the company’s response—eliminating the need to click on links at all by offering AI-generated summaries—could accelerate the decline of the web.

The reason is that the internet is an ecosystem, with Google as one of the primary providers of traffic—and therefore revenue. Without the traffic that Google sends across the web, the incentive and resources to continue producing websites attractive to Google’s search algorithm will decline.

Joerg Klueckmann, head of marketing at European fintech giant Finastra, worries about just that. Once more people are relying on AI to answer questions as much as early adopters like him are, traffic to websites will dry up. “And then, what do you do with your search-engine marketing team? What does that mean for all the websites we have out there?”

This process has already begun. While Google reported strong revenue growth last quarter, the rate at which people clicked on ads that appear in search results was down 8% compared with a year ago, according to data from advertising platform Skai. It’s not clear why this is happening, but one logical conclusion is that it’s the result of Google’s own AI-based summaries, which eliminate the need to click on sponsored links or scroll down to where the ads are.

One study from January by search-engine-optimization software company Authoritas found that Google’s AI answers in its search results could upend rankings and traffic to existing websites. And ad sales firm Raptive has projected that the full rollout of this change to search could erase $2 billion in revenue for publishers....

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Today I Learned...

..."The bony-eared assfish may have the smallest brain-to-body weight ratio of any vertebrate...."

—Via Kiddle, the kids encyclopedia.

"Nissan Slashing US Production By 17% As It Fights For Survival"

From Carscoops, November 27:

• The brand recently announced that roughly 6% of its US workforce will accept early retirement offers by the end of the year
• Due to slowing sales and struggling finances, Nissan may only survive for 12-14 months if it can’t find a new anchor investor.
• Nissan recently revealed it is selling more than 149 million Mitsubishi shares.

The Frontier and Rogue account for roughly 30% of the brand’s US sales.

Nissan is cutting production in the US through to the end of March 2025 in a move that will impact the output of the popular Frontier and Rogue....

****

....In August, Honda, Mitsubishi, and Nissan announced they would work together to build electric vehicles and software. While this tie-up has been positioned as a partnership, former Nissan and Renault boss Carlos Ghosn has suggested it could be a disguised takeover of Mitsubishi and Nissan by Honda.

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Destroy Russia

Move over RAND Corporation, with your consultant/think tank mind-set, here's some real realpolitik:

it’s been almost 3 years now, and the sanctions against russia clearly haven’t stopped her ability to wage war. the west needs to do something that will really damage russia’s economy

let russia into the eu

— Air Katakana (@airkatakana) November 26, 2024

"Balkan Operation Nets Pink Panther Boss, Cocaine Kingpin"

 From the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, November 29:

In a Europol-coordinated operation across three Balkan countries, police arrested 11 suspects, including a leader of the Pink Panthers. The operation came a day after Ecuadorian authorities arrested the so-called “Serbian Escobar.” 

Police in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia arrested 11 people suspected of smuggling more than half a tonne of cocaine from South America into the European Union, the EU law enforcement agency Europol said Wednesday.

The criminal network is believed to have imported multi-tonne shipments of cocaine from Colombia through Brazil and Ecuador, Europol said.

In March 2021, authorities seized cocaine concealed in the modified floor of a cargo container at the Croatian port of Ploče. The shipment’s street value was estimated at 50 million euros ($52.8 million). Europol said the seizure highlighted a trend of international drug traffickers increasingly targeting smaller EU ports.

The arrests also shed light on the involvement of Balkan criminals in the global cocaine trade, as revealed by the takedown of encrypted communication platforms EncroChat, Sky ECC, and Anom.

The investigation has identified 18 suspects so far. Four are already in prison, and international warrants have been issued for three others, according to Europol.

Among those arrested Tuesday during the cross-border operation was a suspect identified by Serbian media as Dragan Mikić, allegedly the leader of the Pink Panthers, a notorious jewel-theft gang. Europol did not confirm the identity but said the suspect was involved in high-value thefts and escaped prison in the early 2000s....

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Previously on the jewel thieves:

July 2013 - 'Pink Panther' jewel thief breaks out of Swiss jail (340 robberies, 330 million euros [£280m] booty) 

August 2019 - Pink Panthers—“A Stunning Coup”: The Almost Unsolvable Harry Winston Diamond Heists

And a couple prior mentions of the Pink Panthers:

How the Hell Did A Lone Bandit Steal $136 Million In Diamonds?
"Cannes Thief Nabs $53 Million Worth of Jewels and Diamonds"

And then there's always Gary Grant, Grace Kelly, French Riviera, directed by Hitchcock:

The picnic scene that overlooks Monaco: 1009 D53 (Avenue des Anciens Combattants d'Afrique du Nord), 06240 Beausoleil.^[1]

^[1]  Le Stuff: To Catch A Thief

From: "To Catch a Thief (1955) - locations"

Here's a side-by-side comparison of how the locations have changed

"How China Could Strike Back At Trump's Tariffs"

First off, any analyst, commentator or pundit that treats what's going on as static is going to be in error, perhaps by huge amounts. It's not a decision tree but rather a four-dimensional (including time) matrix: If the U.S. government does this, China does this, this and this and then the American importers and end users do this, this and this. With substitution effects at all levels the permutations spin off into complexity that requires a supercomputer just to tell you what the possibilities are, much less the probabilities.

The opposing parties are almost better off hiring some old-school commodity traders from Chicago and Dalian to do a sub-conscious mind-meld with the matrix, settling into Csikszentmihalyi's Flow and just act/react on gut instinct.

Or something. Anyhoo, from Asia Times via MenaFN, November 25:

America's industries, including defense, outsourced tens of thousands of key parts to China during the past 20 years. US manufacturers don't produce capacitors, accumulators, pumps, compressors, switching equipment and other essential equipment for US electrical utilities.

None of these are hard to manufacture or expensive when manufactured in volume. But rebuilding industrial capacity for a wide range of critical inputs would be extremely expensive. Key dependencies on Chinese imports make America vulnerable to Chinese retaliation in the event of a trade war.

President-elect Donald Trump has proposed 60% tariffs on Chinese imports, while the US Congress Select Committee on China wants to strip China of its Most Favored Nation trading status, which could lead to tariffs of 100%.

China's exports to the US peaked at over 10% of its GDP (in US dollars) in 2005, but have fallen to just over 2% of GDP today. If trade relations with the US rupture, which side would suffer more? It's hard to reckon with all the variables, but the United States well might well come out worse.

Graphic: Asia Times

Asia Times published the first study showing that China had re-routed a large portion of its exports to the US via third countries (“The Great re-shoring charade,” April 6, 2023).

Since then, the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, Bank for International Settlements and the office of Senator Marco Rubio have published supporting evidence. Vietnam and Mexico now export 25% of their GDP to the United States. As noted, China exports barely over 2%....

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See:

The great re-shoring charade - Asia Times
Apr 6, 2023The great re-shoring charade China's position in global supply chains strengthens as US pretends to 'friend-shore' its imports by David P. Goldman April 6, 2023

Shrinking US CapEx makes re-shoring a charade - Asia Times
Dec 1, 2023 In April 2023, Asia Times released a study of US trade dependencies under the title, "The Great Re-Shoring Charade." We found that the United States imported less from China only because it imported more from countries dependent on Chinese semi-finished goods, components and capital goods. In effect, America's "friend-shoring" partners assembled finished goods out of imported Chinese ... 

 

In addition to the defense stuff, America's reliance on China for medical equipment and pharmaceuticals/precursors (we can't even make our own damn fentanyl profitably) is pretty stupid. The outro from November 12's "How China reduced its reliance on US farm imports, softening trade war risks":

The U.S. should maybe take the cue and wean itself off Chinese-manufactured medical products and pharmaceuticals to start.

Also: "Security Implications of China’s Auto Dominance"

And: "RAND Corporation: 'Metals Military and Mining'"

And: "Rage, Rage Is The Only Appropriate Reaction":

Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane.

"Can desalination quench agriculture’s thirst?"

But what of the halophytes?*

From Knowable Magazine, November 21:

Miles away from the ocean, projects are afoot to clean up salty groundwater and use it to grow crops. Some say it’s a costly pipe dream, others say it’s part of the future. 

Ralph Loya was pretty sure he was going to lose the corn. His farm had been scorched by El Paso’s hottest-ever June and second-hottest August; the West Texas county saw 53 days soar over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer of 2024. The region was also experiencing an ongoing drought, which meant that crops on Loya’s eight-plus acres of melons, okra, cucumbers and other produce had to be watered more often than normal.

Loya had been irrigating his corn with somewhat salty, or brackish, water pumped from his well, as much as the salt-sensitive crop could tolerate. It wasn’t enough, and the municipal water was expensive; he was using it in moderation and the corn ears were desiccating where they stood.

Ensuring the survival of agriculture under an increasingly erratic climate is approaching a crisis in the sere and sweltering Western and Southwestern United States, an area that supplies much of our beef and dairy, alfalfa, tree nuts and produce. Contending with too little water to support their plants and animals, farmers have tilled under crops, pulled out trees, fallowed fields and sold off herds. They’ve also used drip irrigation to inject smaller doses of water closer to a plant’s roots, and installed sensors in soil that tell more precisely when and how much to water.

In the last five years, researchers have begun to puzzle out how brackish water, pulled from underground aquifers, might be de-salted cheaply enough to offer farmers another water resilience tool. Loya’s property, which draws its slightly salty water from the Hueco Bolson aquifer, is about to become a pilot site to test how efficiently desalinated groundwater can be used to grow crops in otherwise water-scarce places.

Desalination renders salty water less so. It’s usually applied to water sucked from the ocean, generally in arid lands with few options; some Gulf, African and island countries rely heavily or entirely on desalinated seawater. Inland desalination happens away from coasts, with aquifer waters that are brackish — containing between 1,000 and 10,000 milligrams of salt per liter, versus around 35,000 milligrams per liter for seawater. Texas has more than three dozen centralized brackish groundwater desalination plants, California more than 20.

Such technology has long been considered too costly for farming. Some experts still think it’s a pipe dream. “We see it as a nice solution that’s appropriate in some contexts, but for agriculture it’s hard to justify, frankly,” says Brad Franklin, an agricultural and environmental economist at the Public Policy Institute of California. Desalting an acre-foot (almost 326,000 gallons) of brackish groundwater for crops now costs about $800, while farmers can pay a lot less — as little as $3 an acre-foot for some senior rights holders in some places — for fresh municipal water. As a result, desalination has largely been reserved to make liquid that’s fit for people to drink. In some instances, too, inland desalination can be environmentally risky, endangering nearby plants and animals and reducing stream flows.

But the US Bureau of Reclamation, along with a research operation called the National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI) that’s been granted $185 million from the Department of Energy, have recently invested in projects that could turn that paradigm on its head. Recognizing the urgent need for fresh water for farms — which in the US are mostly inland — combined with the ample if salty water beneath our feet, these entities have funded projects that could help advance small, decentralized desalination systems that can be placed right on farms where they’re needed. Loya’s is one of them.

US farms consume over 83 million acre-feet (more than 27 trillion gallons) of irrigation water every year — the second most water-intensive industry in the country, after thermoelectric power. Not all aquifers are brackish, but most that are exist in the country’s West, and they’re usually more saline the deeper you dig. With fresh water everywhere in the world becoming saltier due to human activity, “we have to solve inland desal for ag … in order to grow as much food as we need,” says Susan Amrose, a research scientist at MIT who studies inland desalination in the Middle East and North Africa....

....MUCH MORE

*Maybe we shouldn't desalinate for corn and other row crops: 

November 4, 2019

Rising Sea Levels? Get to Know the Halophyte Crops

Back in September 2014 we were looking at one possible use for these little guys, now there may be others:
For now just a personal bookmark.
If the idea of greening deserts with canals of seawater pans out we'll be back with more.

From Aeon Magazine:

Ever since ancient times, the sowing of salt has been synonymous with severe and deadly retribution. The Roman general Scipio Africanus the Younger was said to have ended the Third Punic War in 146BC by razing Carthage, enslaving its population and spreading salt on its fields. In the biblical book of Judges (9:45), the brutal and unprincipled King Abimelech laid siege to the Canaanite city of Shechem. ‘He took the city,’ the biblical story says, ‘and slew the people that was therein, and beat down the city, and sowed it with salt.’

Salt kills most plants. In fact, it attacks them in much the same way that carbon monoxide kills humans. In cases of carbon monoxide poisoning, CO molecules exhaust the carrying capacity of your red blood cells, depriving your body of the oxygen it needs. Likewise, most terrestrial plants soak up the sodium ions and sodium chloride from salt much faster than they can absorb essential nutrients such as potassium, calcium and magnesium. Without those nutrients, they perish. Spread salt on the fields of your enemies and their crops will fail.

More than 97 per cent of the water on Earth is saline. Wouldn’t it be cruel if nature had locked up the vast bulk of the planet’s vital fluids in a form that no plant could drink? Well, as it happens nature is not quite that cruel. Of the 400,000 flowering plant species around the world, 2,600 do drink seawater. They are halophytes, meaning ‘salt-plant’, and they might just be the answer to a question surprisingly few governments have yet asked: namely, how can we put our planet’s practically infinite volumes of saltwater to good use?

It might not be immediately obvious why such a question is worth our time. But consider: between sea-level rise and the increase in droughts and floods, the acreage available for conventional, freshwater agriculture is shrinking rapidly. Freshwater aquifers are becoming increasingly salty: among them, the Ogallala Aquifer, which covers a quarter of the irrigated land in the US. And so one of the world’s most important breadbaskets is under threat. Elsewhere, one-sixth of the world’s population relies on Eurasian rivers that trace back to Himalayan glaciers, which are themselves disappearing because of climate change....MORE

Additionally:
Royal Kew: "Salt Tolerance (eHALOPH)"
DesertCorp
US Salinity Laboratory: Research Databases
USDA: Salt-Tolerant Plants
Boston University BU Today: Lessons from Venice

"Logistics provider GLP is considering a Hong Kong listing in 2025, sources say"

Is Singapore's stock market going to wither away in the manner of London's?

An exclusive from Reuters, November 29:

• GLP, which was listed in Singapore, went private in 2017
• Has a presence in 17 countries
• Relisting plan is partly fuelled by China's economic stimulus, says source

Logistics company GLP is considering a Hong Kong listing that could happen as early as next year, eight years after the Singapore-incorporated firm was taken private by an investor group, three sources with direct knowledge of the matter said.

GLP has held early stage discussions with a small number of financial advisers about the relisting plan, said two of the sources and a fourth person with knowledge of the matter.

The timing of the listing and GLP's potential valuation in the offering are too early to be determined and would depend on market conditions, the two sources said.

 

The firm's total net asset value has reached about $20 billion, said one of the two sources and the third source.

 

GLP, which according to its website develops and operates logistics real estate, data centres, renewable energy and related technologies, with a presence in 17 countries including Brazil, China, Europe, India, Japan, the U.S. and Vietnam, declined to comment.

 

The sources did not want to be identified as the information was confidential.

GLP's plan to relist is partly fuelled by China's economic stimulus and property support measures released over the past few months that have led to an improvement in the country's stock markets, the fourth source said.

 

GLP is a major commercial and logistics property manager and investor sentiment towards China's property sector would be a key factor in the company's relisting considerations, two of the sources said.

 

The relisting in Hong Kong, if finalised, will be a major boost for the financial hub which has seen total listing value and number of deals decline in recent years....

....MUCH MORE

 

As we saw in September's "Singapore-Traded Grand Venture Technology Eyes Second Listing in Malaysia":

Malaysia IPOs have raised far more than Singapore this year

Meanwhile in Montana....

It's been a while since we visited the world-famous (not kidding) "Bozeman Police Reports."

From the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, this one from October 29:

Police reports: Panic attack, tossing Cheez-Its, knife-juggling Trumper 

Bozeman Police reports Saturday included:

• Caller said a male and female were screaming at each other and it was going on for 10 minutes. They were stomping around. The female said, "You always do this to me". It happens about every two weeks. It was determined to be a female having a panic attack, not a domestic disturbance. 

• A male was sleeping on a neighbor's lawn. He advised he was fine and just intoxicated. He indicated his residence was just across the street and that he did not need further assistance.

• Caller received 10 phone calls and 20 text messages from group of four teens in Manhattan, believed to be at the Manhattan volleyball game together. They used weird voices and stated they knew where he lived. He spoke with three of the four teens' parents and parents assured him it would not happen again. Caller was advised to contact Manhattan PD, not Bozeman.

• Caller has questions about whether it is legal to ride in a truck bed without seat belts.

• A woman threw Cheez-Its and a small piece of paper out her car window. Caller confronted the woman and she left. She still wanted to report it because she is sick of people doing this. She wanted the incident documented.

Total reports: 144.

Bozeman Police reports Friday included:

• Caller reported a missing garage-door opener from vehicle, possibly at the fairgrounds. A $300 pair of sunglasses was not taken, only the opener clipped top the visor. Car was locked. A bunch of stuff on the front seat wasn't touched, the console wasn't touched, and nothing else was disturbed.

• Caller working for Door Dash was scammed out of money by a migrant worker who is a scammer who came into the country to do bad things. Caller lives in Utah but comes here to work and sleeps in his car. The fraud happened in Bozeman. Caller is a Spanish speaker and will need a translator. 

• Caller requested to speak about concerns for speeders on the block of North Grand Avenue and was told extra patrol checks are an option. Caller wanted to know if there is anything they can do as a community. 

• Caller wanted a call back to discuss a peaceful protest in front of and across the street from the Emerson. Would like to know their rights and be given a heads up on what they are planning. 

• A man was juggling knives on Main Street and has a Trump sign. He was collecting donations for Trump. Caller said when she ignored him he stated, "I can ignore people, too." He is really good at juggling and can also balance a knife on his tongue, which is neat. The knives are not sharp, which was a bit of a letdown. Male was advocating for people to vote.

• Caller said a male keeps kidnapping her cat. She was informed the laws of kidnapping to not apply to a cat and told to seek resolution civilly in divorce or civil court. She hung up on officer upon hearing information without a resolution.

Total records: 169.

Here is the most recent offering:

Police reports: Reckless Lexus driver, splashed on a forklift, baton threat

And search results for the key words: CRIMINAL JUSTICE

"Solar glut boosts California power bills — other states reap the benefits - Los Angeles Times"

Someone in government apparently can't do math.*

From the Los Angeles Times via MSN, November 24:

California is making so much solar energy that large commercial operators are increasingly forced to stop production, raising questions about the state’s costly plan to shift entirely to carbon-free sources of electricity.

In the last 12 months, California’s solar farms have curtailed production of more than 3 million megawatt hours of solar energy, either on the orders of the state’s grid operator or because prices had plummeted because of the glut, according to an analysis of data by The Times.

That’s enough to power 518,000 California homes for a year, based on average electricity usage.

The amount of curtailed solar power has more than doubled from 1.5 million megawatt hours in 2021, state records show, and is up eight times from levels in 2017.

The waste would have been even larger if California had not paid utilities in other states to take the excess solar energy, documents from the state’s grid operator show. That means green energy paid for by California electricity customers is sent away, lowering bills for residents of other states.

Arizona’s largest public utility reaped $69 million in savings last year by buying from the market California created to get rid of its excess solar power. The utility returned that money to its customers as a credit on their bills.

Also reaping profits are electricity traders, including banks and hedge funds.

The increasing oversupply of solar power has created a situation where energy traders can buy the excess at prices so low they become negative, said energy consultant Gary Ackerman, the former executive director of the Western Power Trading Forum. That means the solar plant is paying the traders to take it.

“This is all being underwritten by California ratepayers,” Ackerman said.

California grid officials warned in 2017 that the curtailments were a sign that the state was overbuilding renewables and “not financially sound.”

Since then the problem has grown exponentially. Once the state curtailed solar power only on sunny mild spring days when there was little need for air conditioning. Now solar farms must be shut down even on hot summer days when demand is high.

Solar is the linchpin of California’s plan to generate all its electricity from carbon-free sources by 2045, but some energy experts question the feasibility of the plan given the state’s inability to use its existing solar capacity.

On some days, more than half the available solar power goes to waste, said Phillippe Phanivong of the California Institute for Energy and Environment located at UC Berkeley.

He calculates that the amount of power curtailed increased by 500% between 2017 and 2022 — a rise he called “alarming.” During that same time, the state’s renewable energy generation increased by 40%.

“Can we even get to 100% renewable energy with this growth rate of curtailment?” Phanivong asked.

The solar glut also means higher electricity bills for Californians, since they are effectively paying to generate the power but not using it.

California’s electric rates are roughly twice the nation’s average, with only Hawaii having higher rates. Rates at Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric increased by 51% over the last three years.

“Ratepayers aren’t getting the energy they’ve paid for,” said Ron Miller, an energy industry consultant in Denver. He calculates that the retail value of the solar energy thrown away in a year would be more than $1 billion.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s advisors and those who manage the state’s electric grid say they are working to reduce the curtailments, including by building more industrial-scale battery storage facilities that soak up the excess solar power during the day and then release it at night....

....MUCH MORE

*In addition to being innumerate the state is raising a generation of illiterates: 

"California has the lowest literacy rate of any state, data suggests"

"Chinese EV maker BYD asks dozens of suppliers for price cuts, Yicai reports"

Building electric vehicles profitably is hard.

But somewhat easier when you are so big you can ask for discounts from companies that depend on you and expect to get them.

A quick hit from Reuters, November 29:

Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD has requested price cuts from dozens of its suppliers, state-owned news outlet Yicai reported on Friday citing unidentified sources.

The automaker mainly sent requests to suppliers of electric control units and sensors but could send more to some of its over 8,000 suppliers in other categories, Yicai said.

BYD did not immediately respond to Reuters' request for comment.

Black Friday Stuff

First up, the two Thanksgiving Day pieces from the Paris Review are just so satisfying I had the brilliant thought to check what P.R. might have for Black Friday.
And was rewarded with:

Black Friday, the Poem

The Paris Review staff is off in a tryptophan-induced haze, so we’re reposting some of our favorite Thanksgiving pieces. Enjoy your holiday!

“The New York Gold Room on ‘Black Friday,’ September 24, 1869.” —E. Benjamin Andrews 1895

While most of us know Black Friday as the nightmarish commerce-fest following Thanksgiving—a term coined in Philadelphia in 1961—in fact the nom de guerre dates back to the nineteenth century. In 1869, the robber barons Jay Gould and James Fisk attempted to corner the gold market, resulting in financial crisis and scandal.

E. C. Stedman, a poet and broker(!), wrote the following:

One Hundred and Sixty! Can’t be true!
What will the bears-at-forty do?
How will the merchants pay their dues?
How will the country stand the news?...

 ...MORE

We too have referenced the doings on Sept 24, 1869. An example from 2013:

It May Have Been October 2008 When I Lost My Mind

....Here's a stock market oriented version of Steely Dan's "Black Friday"*, worth the watch:

   

*The song refers to Black Friday, September 24, 1869 when an attempted corner of the gold market by James Fisk and Jay Gould was broken by the Federales.

When Black Friday comes
I'll stand down by the door
And catch the gray men
When they dive from the fourteenth floor
When Black Friday comes
I'll collect everything I'm owed
And before my friends find out
I'll be on the road
When Black Friday falls you know it's got to be
Don't let it fall on me...

"Apollo Sees $50 Trillion Opportunity in Energy Transition"

Come get you some.

From Bloomberg, November 28:

• Apollo sees an ‘industrial renaissance’ opportunity: Mapondera
• Private credit market has held up better than expected so far

Apollo Global Management Inc. sees an “industrial renaissance” emerging as part of an energy transition investment opportunity worth $50 trillion over the coming decades, according to Leslie Mapondera, a partner at the private capital firm.

“Just in Europe there’s probably $1.8 trillion to be spent” between 2025 and 2030, Mapondera, the company’s co-head of European credit, said at the Bloomberg Intelligence credit market outlook conference in London on Thursday.

Apollo manages about $275 billion of investment-grade credit and its high grade capital solutions business — which focuses on multibillion-dollar corporate deals — has originated about $100 billion in the past four years, including transactions with Intel Corp. and Air France-KLM. The firm is targeting 150 to 200 basis points of excess spread from many of those large deals, he said.

“Historically the market has thought about risk and illiquidity as being relatively aligned but we don’t think that’s so much the case,” he said....

....MUCH MORE

Hmmm....that last sentence just sort of hangs there.

Maybe not a "permanently high plateau" sort of thing (NYT, Oct. 16, 1929) but it does bring to mind something we wrote in an article on the color of the Financial Times newspaper regarding Professor Edward Altman, he of the Altman Z-score:

...After Altman left academia he went to Morgan Stanley and found an historical 1% default rate.
Of course is was totally in error but MS marketing guys liked it.
And he's back at NYU and no one ever mentions the 1% thing. 

We May See China Scale Back Open Market Gold Purchases Over The Next Decade

From ScienceAlert, November 29:

World's Largest Gold Deposit Found, Worth Over US$80 Billion 

A deposit of high-quality gold ore containing around 1,000 metric tons (1,100 US tons) of the precious metal has been discovered in central China, according to Chinese state media.

Valued at approximately 600 billion yuan or US$83 billion, the discovery could be considered the largest and most lucrative reservoir of gold ever uncovered, surpassing the 900 metric tons estimated to lie within the mother of all gold reserves, South Deep mine in South Africa.

The Geological Bureau of Hunan Province announced the detection of 40 gold veins within a depth of 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) in the northeast Hunan county of Pingjiang.

These alone were thought to contain 300 metric tons of gold, with 3D modeling suggesting additional reserves may be found to a depth of 3 kilometers.

"Many drilled rock cores showed visible gold," says bureau prospector Chen Rulin.

Core samples suggest every metric ton of ore could contain as much as 138 grams (nearly 5 ounces) of gold – an extraordinary level of quality considering ore excavated from underground mines is considered high grade if it contains more than 8 grams....

....MUCH MORE

"London’s Smithfield Market to close after 900 years"

Sticking with food & drink for a couple more posts, from The Times (Londinium), November 26:

A vote has sealed the fate of the market, but legal experts say the plan may be unlawful — as City of London Corporation plans to pay traders millions in compensation

Smithfield, the capital’s oldest meat market, is to close — bringing to an end 900 years of trading on the historic site.

The fate of both Smithfield and Billingsgate fish market, in Canary Wharf, was sealed during a private vote by the governing body of their owner and operator, the City of London Corporation, on Tuesday afternoon.

The Corporation had previously planned to relocate both markets to a new site in Dagenham, in the capital’s eastern suburbs.

However, owing to cost overruns, the court approved a new plan to scrap the £1 billion relocation plan but close the market regardless.

Instead, the Corporation will offer the traders compensation payments, which The Times understands could total more than £300 million, and table a bill in parliament to absolve itself of responsibility for running the market. The markets will operate until “at least” 2028

The governing body said after the vote it was “actively supporting traders to identify suitable new sites” but there is no obligation on the traders to reopen their businesses elsewhere.

A market has operated on or near the Smithfield site since the tenth century. In 1174 it was described by William Fitzstephen, clerk to Thomas Becket, as “a smooth field where every Friday there is a celebrated rendezvous of fine horses to be sold, and in another quarter are placed vendibles of the peasant, swine with their deep flanks, and cows and oxen of immense bulk”. The corporation was given the right to run it and other wholesale food markets in 1327 by Edward III.

Now the authority wants to turn the Smithfield site into a mixed-use cultural development alongside the London Museum and redevelop the Billingsgate site as housing.

Three King’s Counsel barristers, who sit on the hundred-strong court, have written to the Corporation’s “town clerk”, warning that the vote could be “unlawful” because a study into the importance of the markets to London’s food supply, demanded by the court this year, has not yet been produced. 

“Understanding the social and economic importance of the existing markets is vital to any decision by the court to abolish them, as is the social and economic implications of doing so,” the letter reads.

“The failure to have this information available would, we are concerned, be unlawful,” write Gregory Jones KC, Suzanne Ornsby KC and William Upton KC.

On Monday the corporation told The Times that its own lawyers were “satisfied” with the legality of the vote.

Meanwhile, Henry Pollard, chairman of the markets committee, has written to his court colleagues warning that “the process here is wrong”, criticising the lack of a food security report and warning that the additional compensation to the traders — “an unquantified amount [of] over £300 million” — could be a misuse of public funds.

Even with the compensation payment to traders, scrapping the relocation of the markets and giving up the responsibility to run a wholesale market would save the corporation more than £600 million. It would be a similar sum to refresh the markets for a further 20 years of use, according to an internal corporation paper first reported by the local democracy campaign group Reclaim EC1....

....MUCH MORE

Also at the Times: "Antarctic luxury cruise passengers go on hunger strike over engine failure"

Earlier: "Boozing it Up In The French Alps"

Boozing it Up In The French Alps

From the Fort Worth Star Telegram, November 26:

Ruins of Roman winery — at least 1,500 years old — found in French Alps. Look inside

From reds to whites and merlots to sauvignon blancs, France is wine country. 

The 8,000-year-old tradition took root in France around the sixth century B.C. when the southern Gauls were settled by the Greeks, later to be encapsulated in the Roman Empire. 

Now, archaeologists in the French Alps have found evidence of this ancient trade along a Gallo-Roman road, according to a Nov. 22 news release from the French National Institute for Preventative Archaeological Research. 

In 1865, work along a mountain slope unearthed multiple Gallo-Roman substructures, archaeologists said. From 1869 to 1870, more than 400 feet of structure was discovered, including 70 rooms, some of which had mosaic paving, according to the release. 

Five new buildings, including private baths, were excavated between 1977 and 1981, researchers said, all of which dated to between the first and fifth centuries. 

On the southeast end of the buildings, archaeologists have found a room separated by a terrace wall, an aqueduct and what appears to be a road ditch, according to the release.

The building was used for wine production, archaeologists said. It was identified by its location and the structures found inside. 

The main room is separated into two naves and was likely more of a shed than a full structure, researchers said. Post holes where a roof could be attached were found down the center of the room. 

On one side, archaeologists found a tile mortar where grapes would have been trampled, as well as two decantation tanks that allowed the crushed material to flow through a drain into workshops where the wine would be pressed, archaeologists said....

....MUCH MORE

Une production vinicole antique sur le chemin de Mérande à Arbin (Savoie)

"China poised to turn on one of world’s most powerful sources of x-ray light"

From the journal Science, November 22:

Beams from $657 million next-generation synchrotron will reveal atomic-scale structure of proteins and materials

China is set to fire up a powerful new x-ray light source that will reveal the atomic-scale structure of proteins and materials. By the end of December, operators expect light to begin to stream into experimental beamlines at the High Energy Photon Source (HEPS) near Beijing, which will become one of just a handful of “fourth-generation” synchrotrons in the world.

HEPS revs electrons up to high energies and bends them around a circular track so the particles emit synchrotron radiation—mostly short-wavelength “hard” x-rays. The intense, laserlike x-rays are siphoned off into 14 beamlines that scientists will use to image materials and biological structures at atomic to nanometer scales and take snapshots of chemical reactions over nanosecond time frames.

“It’s like getting a major new telescope. You can see things that were not observable before,” says Mingda Li, who studies the quantum properties of materials at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and chairs the users’ executive committee for the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a U.S. Department of Energy synchrotron at Argonne National Laboratory. “This is a very exciting time for the synchrotron community.”

In structural biology, for example, HEPS will allow scientists to study cellular machines, such as the protein-assembling ribosome, in addition to imaging whole cells and viruses. “We’ll be able to see the protein machines in their natural environment, at high resolution,” says Dong Yuhui, deputy director of the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which will operate HEPS. The big challenge, Dong says, will be managing “the huge data” such experiments generate....

....MUCH MORE

Real Estate: "Why Trump Really Should ‘Buy’ Greenland"

From the Wall Street Journal, November 25:

As the island pursues independence, the U.S. can step in to safeguard Western interests from growing global threats.

During President Donald Trump’s first term, the foreign-policy elite expressed dismay at his public flirtation with “buying” Greenland from Denmark. In his second term, Mr. Trump should pick up right where he left off.

Greenland’s strategic location in the North Atlantic has made its acquisition a topic of discussion among U.S. strategists since the 19th century. Then-Secretary of State William Seward first pursued buying the world’s largest island in 1867. Talk about annexation surfaced anew during World War II, when Denmark surrendered to Nazi Germany and the U.S. occupied Greenland.

Today, despite the guffaws of foreign-policy mandarins, recent changes to the North Atlantic’s geopolitical reality make a formal relationship between Washington and Nuuk—Greenland’s capital city—necessary.

First, Greenlanders are moving toward independence from Denmark. The 2009 Greenland Self-Government Act establishes significant autonomy for the island, including some leeway to conduct its own foreign affairs. Greenland’s February 2024 foreign, security and defense policy says independence is the ultimate objective. But Greenland is the least densely populated political entity in the world. If it separates from Denmark, it would be responsible for its own security, a task it is ill-equipped to handle.*

This is a grave concern given the second important development: Russia and China are threatening the status quo in the Arctic. Moscow has claimed significant chunks of the Arctic Sea, including inside Greenland’s Exclusive Economic Zone. Russian survey ships have encroached on Greenland’s waters, and Russia is expanding its Arctic bases and formidable icebreaker fleet. China has declared itself a “near-Arctic state,” established a shipping network called the “Polar Silk Road” to bind Arctic communities closer to Beijing’s economic and political agenda, and built its own fleet of icebreakers.

Finally, Greenland is believed to have significant natural resources, including gold, silver, copper, oil, uranium and rare earth minerals. This is an opportunity for adversaries to exploit the resources with little regard for local communities or environmental concerns. An independent Greenland would be unable to resist coercive extraction of the kind practiced by China and Russia.

The U.S. can offer an option that preserves Greenland’s sovereignty while protecting it from malign actors....

....MORE

Previously:
June 2018
Chinese Investment In Greenland and Iceland
August 2019
"President Trump Eyes a New Real-Estate Purchase: Greenland"
December 2019
Denmark Puts Mineral-Rich Greenland Top of its National Security Agenda, Ahead of Terrorism and Cybercrime.

....Now back to Greenland.
Trump tried to allay fears re: his oft-times questionable design sensibilities:

I promise not to do this to Greenland! pic.twitter.com/03DdyVU6HA

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 20, 2019

February 2021

"Mining fuels Greenland dreams of independence – and political crisis"

April 2021

Anti-Mining Opposition Party Wins Greenland Election

May 2021
"Blinken confirms the U.S. does not want to buy Greenland after Trump proposal"

 

*That sounds like opportunity. The U.S. should maybe re-engage, and I know just who to call. 

From Dilbert: