Miscellaneous Business/Economics/Energy Items

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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.

Paul Graham:

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.

A Tipping Point?

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So help me Bog, I think the tipping point that is, the end of toleration and indulgence for all things trans is fast approaching. For all that social media, and the social media outlets masquerading as national news and entertainment outlets can pretend otherwise ordinary people have been fed to the teeth with pro-trans propaganda and are beginning to rebel. A most unforeseen development is in the rebellion of parents and alums of a very upper-caste all-girls school against the decision by the school to admit biological males who claim that they are really girls. Well, after the experience of a public school system who were all chuffed no end at having their own special mini-tranny, who was then accused of raping a couple of genuine no-kidding XX girls … well, I’d venture to guess that the bloom is off the tranny rose whenever parents must consider the safety of their daughters. Especially well-heeled parents. Especially when a well-founded suspicion develops that male perverts are trading on claims of being trans to gain access to biological females-only spaces for jollies and their own predatory purposes, and second-rate male athletes are doing it for a chance to rate rather better in their chosen sport by competing against smaller and physically weaker competitors.

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Rapò Sitiyasyon Ayiti

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Most problems were not problems long enough to be interesting.

— Larry Niven, PROTECTOR

Haiti has remained a problem long enough to be interesting.

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Burnout

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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?