Carbon Midwife

For a long, long time these endeavors have complained that the Amazon Way cannot be sustained. The complaint boils down to a simple sentence. It's cheaper to ship by the tonne than by the each. There's a reason national stores exist: they ship from producers by the railcar load and ship to their distribution centers the same way. From there, semi-truck loads deliver to stores. Shipping by the each in 747s doesn't work. The main reason Amazon has rarely shown a profit.

Well, boy howdy, today brings news that Jeff finally concedes to the obvious.

Starting Tuesday, all Prime members in the United States will be able to select a particular day to receive a week's worth of Amazon deliveries. After a Prime member enrolls in the "Amazon Day" service, Amazon will hold everything they order throughout the week, and it will deliver the items together on the customer's selected day.

Well, d'uh.

We'll see if Amazon can sustain if its method becomes indistinguishable from Sears circa 1900. What do you think?

The Asymptote of Progress - part the fifteenth

David Leonhardt today adds some data to the assertion that Depressions are driven by collapsing aggregate demand. Using data from Piketty, Saez, and Zueman one can clearly see that growth has been held down by stagnant moolah in the hands of the many.

You can't have growth, if most of the folks don't have the moolah to buy stuff. Once again.

Alas, once again, Leonhardt makes the common mistake of comparing groups by mean/average. So, we see the 'upper middle class' tracking with per capita GDP. Of course it does!! Per capita (mean/average) tracks with the upper 10% of the income distribution!!! Income/wealth in our kind of economy is heavily right skew. What else would you expect? Leonhardt makes no reference to the meaning of the confluence. Sad.

The Asymptote of Progress - part the fourteenth

A recurring theme in these endeavors is that actual progress was/is driven by the filling out of the periodic table. Turns out that 2019 is the 150^th anniversary of the first attempt at the table. So, here's some reporting memorializing the year.

Quite literally, the periodic table and quantum mechanics explain everything that is familiar about the world. They explain water and rock and people. They explain how the air we breathe oxygenates our lungs. They explain how fires burn and why diamonds are what they are.

So, I guess it's true that progress has been driven by the filling in of the periodic table. Which, I guess, tells us about the future of progress.

I Wish I Said That

Yesterday I heard a mainstream pundit call out "Humpty Trumpty". My head exploded. Not least because I'd failed to coin the epithet. Dang.

So, off to the innterTubes to find out who did it first. Turns out there's more than one version, of course. There's also "Dumpty Trumpty", "Trumpty Dumpty", "Trumpty Dumpy", and so on.

Earliest I found was here on SNL, November, 2015. That long ago. Since I only watch the cold open, hoping for Baldwin, I guess I missed it.

What's Old Is New Again

Again.

In today's (deadtrees division) NYT Tech page, Steve Lohr makes the following assertion:

IBM cannot compete head-on with Amazon, Microsoft and Google in the big-spending game of building out massive data centers to provide the infrastructure layer of cloud computing to one and all. So it is seeking to shift the competition.

Fun factoid: it was IBM who invented the cloud way, way back in the 1960s (or, depending on how picky a definition one wishes to use, 1932) , under the name The Service Bureau (a lengthier history is here). So, yes IBM has and could if it decided to. But IBM hasn't ever really been a tech company, but a marketing machine.

(Don't) Paint It Black

There are all manner of oddities in modern art. Read up this obit of one who took modern to the most extreme. It is a puzzlement how he gained any traction, but it turns out he did.

"It was never an intention of mine to make white paintings," he told Art News magazine in 1986. "The white is just a means of exposing other elements. White enables other things to become visible."

Of course, it's not clear that there are 'other elements' to be found in a plain white surface.

The Asymptote of Progress - part the thirteenth

First the Concorde, now the A380. The light is dimming as the Permanent Dark Age dawns. Once you've filled in the periodic table, life changing innovations peter out. My paternal grandfather was born in 1880 and died in 1967. Just consider how the world around him changed over that span of time.
- automobiles
- telephone
- radio
- TeeVee
- aircraft, and all that brings
- space travel
- medicines of nearly every description
- computers, initially analog then digital then semi-conductor

You can continue to fill in that list at your leisure. Nearly every 'innovation' since 1950, say, is merely an incremental (at decreasing rate) nudge to those items. While population heads toward 8 billion, water becomes scarce, and wealth concentrates.

Have a nice day.

I'll Bet You Don't Know

Here's a factoid that beggars explanation:

The only places that have decriminalized sex work are New Zealand and the state of New South Wales in Australia. In both places, sex work is not penalized through punitive laws, and regulation are premised on worker health and safety, as with any other profession.

Both started as penal colonies of the Brits. But nooky noshing is legit. Who knew?

STDs

Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.
-- The Manchurian President/2019

Socialism
Tempers
Dysfunction

Well... he's way, way too late. First off, what is 'socialism' anyway? Communism is based on widespread/universal common, i.e. state, ownership of capital. But 'socialism' isn't that. Rather, it revolves around the recognition that some goods and services are necessary to full functioning of the society. That is, such goods and services are too important to be left to profit-taking private enterprise for at least one of a few possible reasons. Here are some:
1) private enterprise deems profit too slim to warrant providing the good/service; many vaccines, many forms of R&D
2) the good/service is too vital to survival that consumers have no choice but to buy; again, vaccines
3) individual consumers face monopoly in buying; electricity
4) the good/service is either a directly or indirectly scarce resource in the country; clean air and water
5) enforce 'payment' for otherwise coerced externalities; tailings from smelters

Here is a list, just off the top of my head, of all the 'socialist' vectors currently in our economy.
1) Social Security
2) Medicare
3) Medicaid
4) publicly owned utilities (electricity, water, sewer, gas, innterTubes)
5) public education
6) highways
7) FAA
8) Dept. of Agriculture food inspection
9) $20 billion/year in farm subsidy
10) FDA drug approval
11) EPA (I know, it has no legitmate remit)
12) publicly financed sports arenas
13) pro sports restrictions: salary caps, drafts, limited player movement
14) tariffs (yes, these are just taxes on consumers, allowing domestic producers to raise price)A
15) NOAA (yes, it's being run by the guy from AccuWeather who wants to put NOAA down)

It's Black and White - part the second

Now that it's been reported that other pages of That Yearbook have racist photos inserted, when will the Mainstream Pundits figure out that the most likely explanation is that some of the yearbook staff were mocking N-word loving white folk?

It's Black and White

The moment the yearbook picture appeared, I wondered whether either was Northam. My recollection was that he is 6 foot. He is. The KKK guy on the right is clearly a shrimp. The blackface on the left is about a head taller. Forensic photo analysis, aka FBI/CIA/CSI, can figure his height to a fraction of an inch. Based on the window drape relative to the ceiling, using my house as standard, he's taller than 6 foot. We'll see if anyone cares to know.