Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is said to have produced a breakthrough result in nuclear fusion.  Our species has had its hopes raised and dashed before about the idea of fusion energy -- a sun-like engine tamed and located on earth. In the '90s there was a brief kerfuffle about room-temperature fusion, soon written off. Though the idea still has its fans, the general consensus is that the two chemists concerned got into trouble by wandering out of their lane. Chemistry is not physics and deals with matters orders of magnitude larger.  Or as my friend the proton once said, "when this molecule sits around the house she sits arooooooud the house." Yuck yuck yuck. But the LLNL results look like the real deal. And I have to say, I love the logo. Love the idea of somebody saying "if we just drop the 'N' we can make a neat logo out of three nested Ls." Maybe the N is thought to be implied because, well, nesting.  A lot of lasers, aimed at a target ...

  And the conservatorship is a metaphor for Sovereigns. Indeed, conservatorship is a near-synonym for guardian. And a "guardian" deserves its Platonic connotation. It is what we should call our rulers, because they tell us noble lies legitimating their rule.   I've sometimes remarked that the word "free" in the term "free markets" should be read not as an adjective but as a verb. The phrase is a full sentence and states an imperative: free markets! In the case of the phrase "free Britney" we can play on the same double utility of the word "free." It is both adjective and verb.  Free Britney, so there shall again be a free Britney. 

  You will all be aware by now that New York State has a new Governor, and she is NOT a Cuomo. I'm happy about this. It was time for Andrew Cuomo to go. I would think this even if I were sure that all the charges against him could be dismissed in the way he likes to dismiss them: as an old-fashioned Italian man's tactile exuberance misunderstood. I'm not at all sure they should be so dismissed, and I would like the legislature in Albany to proceed with a fact-finding impeachment and trial. Still: set all that aside for the nonce.  Not long ago, I heard Cuomo call himself an "outsider." That did it for me. The political establishment doesn't like him. That, he was suggesting, is why he had gotten into such trouble. The remark made me think of a trip he must have taken many times. After a meeting in Manhattan, Governor Cuomo the outsider asks his limo driver to take him home to Albany. The driver would likely cross the Hudson near Nyack. If so, during any such t...

 I wrote something brilliant recently that was cut from the piece of which it was a part.  The piece as a whole concerned a certain blockchain named Cartesi and the related token, known as CRTA. One of the distinctive things about Cartesi is that it allows programmers to do some of their work "off blockchain," that is, in a way that will be opaque to other programmers working on the same system. Developers of "smart contracts" on Ethereum use "on chain" virtual machines. But developers on Cartesi generally use Linux to create the contracts rather than using blockchain-specific VMs.  So: what about the name? The term "Cartesi" pays honor to the philosopher Rene Descartes, founder of modern philosophy. This much was covered in the story that I wrote recently for Breaking Daily News.  What was cut was a bit in which I believe I identified specifically WHY Descartes received this honor. Yes, the nerdish types who invent refinements to Ethereum's ...

I saw STILLWATER on a night out recently.  I won't discuss the movie here (maybe another day). What struck me was that this was the first time I had seen the new contact-free snack bar in operation. They don't give change. They still allow you to hand over exact amounts in cash, but short of exactitude you're expected to use a plastic card or one of those swipe-with-your-phone things.  It was an odd feeling,. I was standing there with my newly purchased coke in hand unsure whether I was going to get a paper receipt or something.  Eventually, the clerk had to tell me, "You're all set sir" to get me out of there.  This is sold as pandemic protection. And I'm not a conspiratorial kind of guy.  But I gotta tell you, ladies and germs, this seems to me like part of a broader War on Cash. The powers that be don't like us to have cash, because it allows for difficult-to-trace transactions. My humble purchase of that bottle of Coca-Cola is in a database now. If...

    are reports now that Tesla is entering into  an unlikely partnership,   a plan to buy “blade batteries” from a Chinese company, BYD, for delivery in the second quarter of next year. This is a new generation of battery that may have a lot to do with the course taken by the electric-car industry. That has nothing much to do with this....  In the second quarter 2021, Tesla reported more than $1 billion net income, and earnings per share of $1.45, which beat analyst  expectations of just $0.98.  Tesla’s overall automotive revenue for the quarter was $10.21 billion.  Critics have sometimes knocked Tesla for relying too much on the sale of regulatory credits  as a source of revenue.  A regulatory system in California, like analogous systems in Europe, give credits to automakers depending on how many EVs they manufacture. Those who don’t manufacture a sufficient number of EVs to keep the regulators happy can avoid penalties by buying ...

Tesla is the world's largest manufacturer of electric vehicles.  It is also the one corporate word that comes to mind when one hears the phrase "electric cars." And it has a plant for making them in California.  It was odd, then, that when President Biden held a press event specifically to tout his program for spurring American made EVs, there were corporate executives present, with great smiles: execs from GM, from Ford, and from the successor-corp. to Chrysler, now known as Stellantis. But nobody from Tesla.  Heck, Ford's recent entry into this market is the Mach-E. But it doesn't make them in the US. It makes them in Mexico. Yet Ford is at the big Event and Tesla is not?  Fortunately, Biden's press secretary, Jen Psaki, explained the reason for us. "Well, these [GM, Ford, and Stellantis] are the three largest employers of the United Auto Workers, so I'll let you draw your own conclusions."    So it seems safe to infer that US EV policy under P...

 Latin phrase, "mens sana in corpore sano," originally from a poem by Juvenal, didn't mean in context what you probably think.  It is usually quoted as an ideal. "We should be more like the ancient Romans, who knew that the healthy mind requires a healthy body and vice versa."  It is used to encourage bookish wonks to get out of the library and spend some time in the gym. It is also used in contexts like that of Simone Biles' withdrawal from most of  her Olympic events, to explain that, though her body has been gloriously healthy for years as exhibited in many competitions, she is wise for her to realize that her mental health needs attention too. But, the thing is, that isn't what Juvenal mean. He wasn't using the phrase "mens sana in corpore sano" as an ideal. He was objecting to the decay of morals. Here is a rough paraphrase of the sense of the passage: "In my day, we were Stoics. We did our duty in serving Rome whatever it cost us...

  Think of Trumpism as a poison, and the body politic as, well, a body.  I am feeling optimistic that the poison this body has taken won't kill us. That the body is slowly expelling the poison from its system.  Case in point: The 6th district Congressional race in Texas. Another case in point: Mitch McConnell voting in favor of taking up the bipartisan infrastructure bill.  McConnell may want a nice new bridge in Kentucky with his name on it but, who cares? The point is solely that Trump put out a statement saying the Republicans should resist any infrastructure bill until after the 2022 elections, and McConnell defied him.  McConnell has been the embodiment of the remaining Trumpist poison in the system since his master's slinking departure on January 20th. Now he may be showing some independence of thought.  Heck, in a world in which Dick Cheney's little girl can sound like the Voice of Reason: bars are all set pretty low.  

  "Maidens still wear their Norman caps  and their kirtles of homespun, And by the evening fire repeat Evangeline's story, While from its rocky caverns the deep-voiced, neighboring ocean Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest." -----------------------  Very nice, Henry. What's a kirtle? 

  Peter Thiel, best known as a venture capitalist who made a bundle out of co-founding Paypal, is the author of a fascinating book about business:  Zero to One (2014). The thesis is that it is relatively easy to improve on something that already exists. Thiel asks us to think of that as getting from one to two, or from two to four. But creating something new? a whole new industry? That involves operating at a different level. Consider Facebook . With this company and website already in the field, it was relatively straightforward for other entrepreneurs to vary what Mark Zuckerberg had done, and to create new, perhaps sometimes better, social networks. With the idea of a digital social network already in place, Jack Dorsey, the creator of twitter, was going from one to two.   But Zuckerberg and the small group around him had gone from zero to one.  Meet that challenge. Don’t imitate Zuckerberg. Learn from him.  There's a difference. Now you don't need to r...

One issue underlying the bill I discussed yesterday is CalPERS long-term solvency. CalPERS has estimated that it has as assets now under management only about 71% of what it will need to make the pension payments due to workers of the state and local governments.   That isn't a disastrous shortfall. After all, the payments aren't all due tomorrow. No 72% of them are due tomorrow. And it has investments out that are earning money as we speak. What you don't want to happen, of course, is for retirees to get paid by the revenue from today's workers. The retirees should be paid from the invested value of what they paid into the system, and today's workers should be building up their own future returns. The 71% number is low enough to make managers properly uncomfortable. So it is natural that they look for other avenues to raise money. Even direct non-bank lending. But here we get to the reason there IS a public records act requiring transparency. It is there out of a s...

    California Assembly Bill 386, which one might charitably describe as a bill to encourage more innovative investment by the great California public pension manager, CalPERS, died in committee in the state Senate recently. I don't mourn its passing, for a reason to which I'll come in tomorrow’s posting. Today, I’ll try to explain what the bill in question was. The California Public Records Act requires state agencies and localities to make their records available for public inspection,unless a specific exemption from disclosure applies. There is as the law stands an exemption for certain records regarding alternatives investments in which public investment funds invest. This  protects the arrangements that CalPERS makes with investment funds, "vehicles," including those which employ a private debt strategy. So in effect CalPERS can get into the private debt market only once it partners with a private investment fund already in that business. Then its records, for th...