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David Foster
Miscellaneous Business/Economics/Energy Items
Apple is going to make Watches and MacBooks in Vietnam. (More precisely, Apple suppliers will make the products there. “Make” in this context meaning mostly “assemble”, I think.) Apple is also planning to produce the iPhone 14 in India, with only about a 2-month lag from its initial production in China.
Intel will be partnering with Brookfield Infrastructure Partners to help pay for factory expansion projects, with Brookfield contributing up to $30 billion. Most immediately, the money will pay for the expansion of Intel’s Ocotillo manufacturing campus in Chandler, Arizona, with Intel funding 51% and Brookfield funding 49% of the total project cost. (This is pretty different from BIP’s typical investments, which tend to involve such things as railroads, toll roads, pipelines, and electricity transmission)
A useful overview of planned and in-development fabs, worldwide.
Electricity prices, marginal costs, and the last kilowatt.
Texas has banned BlackRock and several other firms from doing business with the state.
Finland may be facing power outages this winter. On the other hand, if their Olkiluoto 3 nuclear power plant goes into production at the end of the year, as planned, this should help a lot. Another plant is planned, taking total nuclear contribution in Finland to 60%.
Also,perhaps a way could be found to harness the power from their PM’s very high-energy dancing. (If other Western leaders could dance like that, would it somehow influence their minds to adopt more rational energy policies?)
Elsewhere in Europe, skyrocketing energy prices are causing a lot of hardship–and will surely create serious economic pressures as much manufacturing in the affected countries becomes cost-prohibitive)
The Euro is not doing very well versus the dollar. More here.
f you think people have scar tissue, you should see organizations. Each time there’s a disaster, they create a process to prevent future disasters of that type. Eventually they accrete a thick layer of these processes that prevents them from moving. Then they die.
Burnout
Emmett Shear, at Twitter (@eshear) suggests that Burnout, which he defines as “a particularly modern affliction, feeling simultaneously overwhelmed and paralyzed” is best thought of as a symptom with many different causes–the most important of which are permanent on-call, broken steering, and mission doubt. ‘Permanent on-call’ is self-explanatory, ‘broken steering’ is the sense that your actions have no impact, ‘mission doubt’ arises when you question whether this work is really worth doing at all…ie, even if the steering was functioning properly, maybe this trip isn’t worthwhile.
It’s a useful formulation. I’d note that some jobs have always had a permanent on-call aspect; railway workers, for example…see Linda Niemann’s memoir of her experiences on the old Southern Pacific Railroad–no cell phones or even pagers in those days, but there were ‘callers’ who would come to your residence and wake you up when you were needed. Also sailors. But on-call jobs are a lot more common today than they were 20 or 30 years ago.
I think the feeling of ‘broken steering’ has also long been present, in the case of large-bureaucracy employees and some manufacturing workers. An assembly-line worker knows that his task does contribute to the final product..but the connection probably seems pretty remote and abstract when your actual job is to tighten three bolts.
‘Mission’ can be understood in two ways: the purpose of the job in terms of what it produces, and the purpose of the job in terms of income to support yourself and your family. As the second factor becomes taken for granted, the first surely becomes more important. (See Maslow)
Very relevant to this topic is Zeynep Ton’s recent book The Good Jobs Strategy. She discusses the unpredictably-fluctuating employee schedules which are so common in retail..maybe not pure on-call, but close to it…and the disruptive effect these schedules have on an employee’s personal life. She also talks about time pressures that lead to jobs inevitably being done poorly. A former Target cashier, for example, said she was under so much pressure to ring up sales as quickly as possible that if a customer bought 10 bottles of Gatoradein two flavorsshe would scan the first one and then hit the quantity key for ten. The inventory system thought the store had sold 10 lime-flavored Gatorades and no cherry-flavored Gatorades, rather than the mix that had actually just been sold. She also cites a study of a $10 billion company which found that the system had the right information for only 35% of the products…for the other 65%, the discrepancies between the system inventory balances and the actual quantities available averaged 5 units…a third of the target stocking levels. In one case, a certain item was continually out of stock, to the frustration of a regular customer. It turned out that the inventory system thought there were 42 of these on hand, whereas there were actually none. AND, since this particular store hadn’t sold any units in several weeks (because they didn’t have any to sell), the system automatically reduced the target stocking level for that item! Situations like this are surely destructive both of sense of mission and of a functioning steering system.
Your thoughts?
Inflation and Society
Theodore Dalrymple notes that inflation is more than a purely economic phenomenon…it also has profound social and psychological effects.even characterological effects:
For one thing, inflation destroys the very idea of enough, because no one can have any confidence that a monetary income that at present is adequate will not be whittled down to very little in a matter of a few years. Not everyone desires to be rich, but most people desire not to be poor, especially in old age. Unfortunately, when there is inflation, the only way to insure against poverty in old age is either to be in possession of a government-guaranteed index-linked pension (which, however, is a social injustice in itself, and may one day be undermined by statistical manipulation by a government under force of economic circumstances, partly brought about by the very existence of such pensions), or to become much richer than one would otherwise aim or desire to be. And the latter turns financial speculation from a minority into a mass pursuit, either directly or, more usually, by proxy: for not to speculate, but rather to place one’s trust in the value of money at a given modest return, is to risk impoverishment. I saw this with my own father: once prosperous, he fell by his aversion to speculation into comparative penury.
Reminds me of something written by Sebastian Haffner, who grew up in Germany between the wars. Discussing the great Weimar inflation, he says:
Anyone who had savings in a bank, bonds, or gilts, saw their value disappear overnight. Soon it did not matter whether it ws a penny put away for a rainy day or a vast fortune. everything was obliterated…the cost of living had begun to spiral out of control. ..A pound of potatoes which yesterday had cost fifty thousand marks now cost a hundred thousand. The salary of sixty-five thousand marks brought home the previous Friday was no longer sufficient to buy a packet of cigarettes on Tuesday.
The only people who were able to survive financially were those that bought stocks. (And, of course, were shrewd or lucky enough to buy the right stocks and to sell them at the right times.)
Every minor official, every employee, every shift-worker became a shareholder. Day-to-day purchases were paid for by selling shares. On wage days there was a general stampede to the banks, and share prices shot up like rockets…Sometimes some shares collapsed and thousands of people hurtled towards the abyss. In every shop, every factory, every school, share tips were whispered in one’s ear.
The old and unworldy had the worst of it. Many were driven to begging, many to suicide. The young and quick-witted did well. Overnight they became free, rich, and independent. It was a situation in which mental inertia and reliance on past experience was punished by starvation and death, but rapid appraisal of new situations and speed of reaction was rewarded with sudden, vast riches. The twenty-one-year-old bank director appeared on the scene, and also the sixth-former who earned his living from the stock-market tips of his slighty older friends. He wore Oscar Wilde ties, organized champagne parties, and supported his embarrassed father.
Haffner believes that the great inflationparticularly by the way it destroyed the balance between generations and empowered the inexperienced younghelped pave the way for Naziism.
In August 1923 the dollar-to-mark ratio reached a million, and soon thereafter the number was much higher. Trade was shutting down, and complete social chaos threatened. Various self-appointed saviors appeared: Hausser, in Berlin…Hitler, in Munich, who at the time was just one among many rabble-rousers…Lamberty, in Thuringia, who emphasized folk-dancing, singing, and frolicking.
The inflation was eventually brought under control:
Then a miracle happened. “Small, ugly grey-green notes” appeared, with “One Rentenmark” written on them. The small numbers on these notes belied their value. You could use them to buy goods which had previously cost a billion marks. And, most amazingly, they held their value. Goods which had cost 5 Rentenmarks last week would also generally cost 5 Rentenmarks next week.
But the after-effects of the great inflation lived on.
There are two excellent novels, both by author Hans Fallada, which portray the psychosocial impact of the Weimar inflation and its aftermath
Wolf Among Wolves is set in the worst period of the inflation. The protagonist, Wolfgang Pagel, is a well-meaning but rather irresponsible young man trying to make his way in a society with rising social and economic chaos. Can Wolfgang grow up to be a responsible adult?..and can he survive surrounded by wolves without himself becoming a wolf? I reviewed the book here.
Little Man, What Now? is set in a somewhat later time period, 1932. The great inflation of Weimar has come and gone, but the psychological damage as well as the economic damagestill lingers. Johannes and Emma, known to one another as Sonny and Lammchen, are a likeable young couple who marry when Lammchen unexpectedly becomes pregnant. Their world is not the world of Weimar’s avant-garde artists and writers, or of its risque-to-outright-degenerate cabaret scene. It is far from the world of a young middle-class intellectual like Sebastian Haffner. Theirs is the world of people at the absolute bottom of anything that could be considered as even lower-middle-class, struggling to hold on by their fingernails. Here’s my review. There was also a pretty good American movie made based on the book, review here
The Weimar inflation was an extreme case, of course, and we are unlikely to see anything nearly as severe. But, as Dalrymple notes, even less-catastrophic levels of inflation tend to have malign effects. The Biden administration and the Democratic Congress seem remarkably unconcerned about these effects, or with the socially-destructive effects of so many other parts of their total policy set.
On the other hand, if inflation gets sufficiently bad, kids can make kites out of currency. And, if energy prices continue their climb upward, devalued currency could be used for heating fuel.
Humor and Seriousness
Katherine Boyle is a partner at the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz and she is a thoughtful writer on many topics. See her post The Case for American Seriousness at Bari Weiss’s substack; also, her posts at her own substack, The Rambler, especially those concerning family, parenting, and technology.
In an interview, she said “The biggest criticism I got from the (American Seriousness) piece, and other times I’ve written about seriousness, is that it doesn’t leave room for frivolity, play or the unseriousness that makes us deeply human. And I empathize with that sentiment, but I don’t think the opposite of seriousness is humor: the opposite of seriousness is irony.”
I agree absolutely that there is no inconsistency between seriousness and humor…quite the contrary, I would say. Concerning Irony, I’m reminded of something C S Lewis wrote. The following is from The Screwtape Letters, a book of advice from a senior devil to his protege about how to do the maximum harm to humans:
But Flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour-plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers that inherent it the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy: it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it.
Irony, I think, is closely related to the Flippancy about which Lewis’s devil wrote. Also related to irony is Sarcasm, concerning which Field Marshal Lord Wavell offered some thoughts:
Explosions of temper do not necessarily ruin a general’s reputation or influence with his troops; it is almost expected of them (“the privileged irascibility of senior officers,” someone has written), and it is not always resented, sometimes even admired, except by those immediately concerned. But sarcasm is always resented and seldom forgiven. (emphasis added) In the Peninsula the bitter sarcastic tongue of Craufurd, the brilliant but erratic leader of the Light Division, was much more wounding and feared than the more violent outbursts of Picton, a rough, hot-tempered man.
Wavell defined Sarcasm as “being clever at someone else’s expense.” In his view, sarcasm always offends, and a general (or, presumably, any other officer or individual in a position of authority) should never indulge in it.
I think that in many organizations in America today–perhaps, even, most organizations of any size–fear of Cancellation has reached the point at which easy interaction among people–which includes a certain amount of humor–has been replaced with a kind of fragile pseudo-formality. This is not good for either innovation or productivity, not to mention its toxic impact on individual lives.
What are your thoughts on humor, seriousness, irony, and sarcasm?