Gongol.com Archives: December 2017
December 21, 2017
Boeing might take over Embraer
After Boeing set up Bombardier to face nearly 300% tariffs for moving their aircraft across the Canadian-US border, Bombardier teamed up with Airbus. This kind of merger ought not be much of a surprise -- but it'll be very interesting to see whether it has any consequences for the Mitsubishi regional jet.
On USA Today's strong editorial condemning unfit Presidential behavior
The paper was uncharacteristically direct when, in response to a tweet from President Trump attacking a United States Senator, its editorial board said that "Donald Trump, the man, on the other hand, is uniquely awful. His sickening behavior is corrosive to the enterprise of a shared governance based on common values and the consent of the governed." The follow-up from the editorial board says that all of its statements are the results of consensus, but it really might be interesting to see newspaper editorials start to look like Supreme Court decisions -- in which the various members can join in a majority opinion, concur with it, or dissent from it. That would not only be interesting, but the process of "signing" editorials with individuals' names might help to counter some of the misunderstanding that an editorial board is speaking for the news-reporting side of the operation.
Children should be in school, not laboring
(Video) A brief story about a 13-year-old boy in Kabul who supports a family of nine by hauling goods through the streets for pay. His father died young and he works so his sisters can go to school. The boy himself? An inspiration. But his circumstances tell us that the world has a whole lot of work to do before we're truly achieving the full reach of human potential.
What's a college town without rental properties?
Iowa City has decided to limit the number of houses and duplexes that can be rented in any given neighborhood around the University of Iowa to 30%. Paradoxically, the city appears to be concerned that student-dense houses are pushing single-family buyers out of the market.
The skies may be friendly, but the airport concessions aren't
Workers from at least four of the restaurants inside O'Hare Airport went on a brief strike during one of the busiest air-travel days of the year. Reflexive pro- or anti-unionism isn't going to get us especially far as the world economy becomes more and more tightly bound together. The more fragile our systems become, the more sensitive they can be to disruptions -- like a food-service outage at Chicago O'Hare, or a power outage at Atlanta Hartsfield, both of which happened this week. In order for society to obtain the large-scale benefits of tight economic integration, we're going to have to either better ways of dealing with some failures (like doing more to make airport power systems more robust), and of thinking through the human elements required to make other things go (you can't have an airport without food -- but it's also hard to create a lot of social status for people working at an airport Chili's Too). Some deep thinking needs to happen about these issues, since the macro-scale forces that amplify them into major issues aren't going away.
Americans start making our own Scandinavian liquors when the home sources run out
American distillers are now making aquavit. What they really ought to do is figure out how to mimic a particularly tasty (but extremely expensive) Icelandic liqueur called "Bjork".
Couple tells Nebraska sheriff their 60 pounds of pot were for Christmas presents
Seems like a stretch
Few countries have more government debt per person than the United States
Massive government borrowing makes sense if it's at reasonable interest rates for long-term investments -- like durable public infrastructure, or to win a war with existential consequences (like WWII). Anything else is just irresponsible cost-shifting to later generations.
How far would Detroit go to get Amazon's HQ2?
Pretty astonishingly far, according to Crain's: "The proposal ... says the company could operate for 30 years without paying real estate and personal property taxes". Just remember: Sears once was what Amazon is now. The Detroit offer (like others) is reminiscent of the apocryphal exchange between Winston Churchill and a lady: "Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?" His response: "Madam, we've already established that. Now we're only haggling about the price."
Without productivity growth, wages aren't going anywhere soon
One of the key factors that appears to be holding forth (anecdotally) is the very low rate of transfer of the *skills* to use technology from the highly skilled to the less-skilled. Technological tools have gotten radically better, but only the highest-skilled workers know how to use them effectively. And they don't have the time (or incentives!) to teach lower-skilled workers. Thus certain super-productive workers are getting MUCH more productive, but a whole lot of others are stuck at the same skill/productivity level as they were 20 years ago.
One-paragraph book review: "On Liberty"
A must-read, and a must-re-read.
One-paragraph book review: "A Nation of Immigrants"
A brief book from a half-century ago whose spirit remains applicable to a major public policy challenge today
It's nice to see institutional accounts having fun with each other, as the Omaha World-Herald and the Lincoln Journal Star trade barbs on Twitter
