Victor David Hanson is a pretty conservative guy and his point certainly has some merit, but there's definitely some "rose-tinted" glasses here. For example, while I tend to agree with him on the water and environmental assessment studies, the biggest issue in CA is that those farmers' don't pay anywhere near market-pricing for the water, which in turns provides a significant incentive to grow water-hungry crops. That's not the necessarily the best example to illustrate the divide he highlights.
To pretend the water crisis is about food is a giant lie, if the given subtext is we need to eat. The author is smart enough not to outright lie, but he definitely leaves a wildly incorrect impression.
We piss away acre-feet of water per orchard to irrigate almonds, using approximately one gallon of water per almond. I love almonds, but we will live just fine without them. No-one will starve if they don't have almonds.
We export a hundred billion gallons of water per year via alfalfa. ie a year's water supply for a million families. I'm sure Japan will whine if they have to figure out some other way to feed their cattle, but that's their problem. Nobody in California or the US will go without food if Japan and China have more expensive beef, or are forced to internalize the the environmental impact of their food choices.
We grow fucking cotton in the desert. You don't eat cotton.
etc...
I've posted about this before, but pretending that the water crisis in CA is a choice between food, where the subtext is people will go hungry, and environmental concerns is a flat out lie. It's a choice between 2% of the economy that is wildly, ludicrously wasteful with an increasing precious resource and is pitching a tantrum that they may not be able to treat water as effectively free.
Indeed, aside from avocados recently and a few times when there were bacteria scares, I can't think of any time where any American agricultural product couldn't be found in stores.
I definitely believe that the farm subsidies are poorly targeted, but those things above aren't to be snorted at.
I assure you that you could keep America famine free for far less. Indeed pretty much the entire support structure is only 80 years old at the oldest, so america managed just fine for a far longer period of time without supports and without a famine than with them.
Also there are some products (like rice) just shouldn't have 100% availability of US grown products. It isn't like the US will starve without US grown rice, and the US long supported far more rice than was profitable. Importantly the US dropped lots of subsidies on rice, and production wasn't all that impacted (3% declines).
So yeah, you might also say that US support of auto makers is good because never have you been completely unable to find a new US made car to buy, but that doesn't make it necessary and certainly doesn't make it good policy.
America has -- just not in living memory. The single greatest contributor to the absurd American prosperity of the first half of the 20th century is the mysterious extinction of the Rocky Mountain locust, leaving North America the only major landmass with agricultural potential and no native locust species.
This is a fair point, and I don't disagree, but the lobbying is by no means limited to private corporations. For the best example, look at California and the State prison guard unions, who have consistently argued for more mandatory sentencing guidelines and for more prisons, which enriching themselves in the process.
I want to reiterate that I'm with you on private prisons, but the basic point remains that any group (public or private) will act in what it perceives as its best interests, whether those jibe with the platonic ideal or not.
One big danger is assuming that the Pakistani state is some sort of monolithic entity - it isn't. The ISI is a state within the state, and there are significant sectarian movements and tribal loyalties on top of it, and that's without even getting into the nature of the efficacy (or lack thereof) of the governing apparatus across the country (ie, one big movement calls for working with the TTP, or the Pakistani Taliban).
In other words, is it possible that elements in the Pakistani state (read: ISI cells / divisions) and some personnel knew that Bin Laden was in Pakistan? Almost certainly yes.
Is it probable that it was known widely by the governing apparatus as a sort of defacto knowledge discussed at say, the cabinel level? I'd say that's unlikely.
I think its more that the market is pricing in two things in its probability estimation:
1) The deal won't actually close until next summer. Even if we know for certain that the price is locked in at the numbers specified (due to collars or what not), you're investing at $28 to get $33 while locking up assets for a year, while still being subject to risk of Dell issuing a lot of debt that's going to get more expensive (when the Fed raises rates later this year). Ie, its a nice ~15% yield for 1 year, but its a risky asset. Also, unlike typical cases where a company is in play, this trading price suggests that the market doesn't think an alternate bid (IBM? MSFT? ORCL?) is likely to emerge, or at least not a more substantial one.
2) The structure of the tracking stock is unique, and its not clear if the biggest agitator in EMC (Elliot) is on board with this transaction.
My personal bet is that the deal will go through - but the markets are probably pricing in the a) long time frame and b) potential debt exposure from an interest rate rise that may blow it up. For what its worth, in most transactions like this, there's always some gap between the "sale price" and the trading price.
Its a fair point, but its a little bit more complex than that.
For example, EMC's valuation is really dominated by VMWare, of which it owns 80% (indeed, much of the strategic discussion around EMC before Dell emerged had focused on a merger where the parent bought out VMWare or the other way around). VMWare is currently trading ~$33B; Dell could easily take a portion of that stake that EMC owns (say, 25% of that 80%, which would still allow it to maintain majority control) and put that out in the market and generate ~$8B or so (maybe more). Moreover, they could (and probably will) spin off business units that they have less interest in (speculating here, but RSA?). Because EMC has had this traditional federation model, the spinoff / sale of business lines is probably easier than in most areas.
No matter what, the debt overhang is still large, but its definitely not as large as it appears at first glance.
That's absolutely false. To take one example, ModCloth came out of CMU. Way back in the past, Lycos came out of CMU (a multi-billion $ exit back in the old days). More recently, something like Anki is a bunch of CMU engineers; GroupMe's co-founder was a CMU grad.
Also, Google has a big hub there, Uber just opened a robotics research facility,
Steel is a legacy of Pittsurgh's past, not its current. You're free to complain about Pittsburgh, but some data would be nice.
The most amazing thing for me of the piece is the realization that HP still had $110B+ in revenue last year - its a useful reminder to us (put myself squarely in this category) of some of the behemoths in the valley that get short shift at times in the "Silicon Valley" PR ecosystem. There's apparently some interesting research still going in HP labs - one smart friend moved out here to work on Memristors with them (over multiple alternatives), because they had backed the work for a while.
If you get out of the VC/Silicon Valley/Tech universe these companies are appreciated much more. In the wider business world, they still get a lot of attention, largely because they are good businesses despite not having the sex appeal that smaller, but quickly growing companies might have.
Might you know what HP's current stance on memristor research is, by any chance? It's one of those technologies we've all seen simmering away hopefully, and HP's been (or, perhaps, was?) one of the few large SV corporations with an interest in longer-term R&D.
Thanks for that. With the vulnerability of R&D, I'd feared the group may have been sidelined. I noticed they're claiming to be preparing to ship memristor DIMMs in 2016 - hopefully that's a genuinely commercial roadmap, rather than RSN.
Good point, and how often are the blogs and podcasts overflowing with news about IBM and Fujitsu? I discovered long ago that there is a huge difference between generating news and generating the things companies are created to generate (money, products, services, employment, research, etc.) One consequence of this difference is that our unconscious estimates of the comparative scale of what is going on at various companies is wildly distorted by news coverage.
You just found a great advantage that exists for investors that put money in "old" companies. Many of these old companies will make more and more money for decades to come. But most retail investors are only interested in "big growth" from companies such as Twitter, FB, Gopro, etc.
Michael Pettis is one of the smartest guys alive covering China - well worth a read. Though I wonder if he thinks the demand-side issues are truly fixable in any systematic sort of way (ie, he doesn't seem like a Scott Sumner type) - can we shift the basic nature of an economy?
If you haven't already you should read his book, Avoiding the Fall, there are a number of prescriptions inside it on how to go about rebalancing the Chinese economy. It's really well written (as is his blog, especially this post). The central thesis of the book is that the Chinese economy has low consumption as a total proportion of their GDP due to a number of hidden subsidies that transfer wealth from households to businesses and governments in China.
He argues that by removing these subsidies China can rebalance their economy from an investment driven one to a more consumption driven one and achieve a 'rebalancing'. Some subsidies are governments fixing bank interest rates for lenders and depositors (in a way that takes money from depositors to subsidise borrowers) and artificially pegging the exchange rate, which penalises households (who typically in urban settings rely on imported goods) and subsidises businesses (many of whom export their goods).
My economics knowledge is generally self-taught and I don't have the book in front of me so you'll have to forgive any errors - but hope that helps!
Japan may not officially have nuclear weapons, but they do not lack the capability - if they decided to weaponize (which would never happen short of a Chinese existential threat), they could do so in a matters of days, not months - the nuclear knowhow is clearly there.
The rest of your point is fair - for Japan to go to war would take a fundamental shift in the country, and its questionable whether the Senkaku Islands would meet that level. China is an aggressive, scary power in a lot of ways, and we ought to be cognizant of the dangers it poses - and the Japanese (and the Vietnamese, and the Phillipinos) are.
"Days" seems way too short. I Googled a bit, and the pages that came up (see below) suggest between 6 months and 10 years.
The estimates vary depending on how many and what kind of weapons they would build. Apparently Japan has a small stockpile of weapon-grade plutonium, and a huge stockpile of less refined plutonium. So they could build a small number of bombs quickly (the 6 month estimate), but building more would require either designing the weapon around less refined plutonium (which increases the risk that it would not work) or building a refinement plant (several years). They would also need some way to deliver the weapons---the most difficult option is ballistic missiles, which gives the 10-year estimate, while cruise missiles on submarines would be faster.
> A nuclear triad — land- and sea-based missiles combined with weapons delivered by manned bombers — holds little promise in light of Japan's lack of geographic depth and the vulnerability of surface ships and aircraft to enemy action. That means fielding an undersea deterrent would be Tokyo's best nuclear option.
> Japan may not officially have nuclear weapons, but they do not lack the capability - if they decided to weaponize (which would never happen short of a Chinese existential threat), they could do so in a matters of days, not months - the nuclear knowhow is clearly there.
You don't make nuclear weapons in days. Unless you have no idea what you are talking about. Weapon grade uranium takes months to produce. Why do you think Iran has been trying for so long to make such material ?
Ok then. With that and since they've almost certainly designed a device and worked out the logistics just in case I'm quite willing to believe they could get a number of boosted fission devices assembled in less than a month.
Japan has one of the worlds largest stockpiles of plutonium. Nine tons stored at home, and thiry five tons stored in Europe waiting to be reprocessed into MOX fuel.
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/03/the...