Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

At this time of year I ask myself what were the biggest stories of the year ending in business/financial news. Last year Covid-related stories of course dominated. This year ... not so much. In fact, I've found it pretty easy to keep Covid, inclusive of Delta's dawn and whatever Omicron has on, off of this list altogether.   The issue of ransomware -- more akin to a computer virus than to the coronavirus -- dominated the late spring, so it gets its props here in two consecutive months. This was also a year when it became obvious that fossil fuels aren't going away, and two of our monthly entries are devoted to that point.  I'll break it down by month as usual, and as is my habit I will avoid assigning priority among the various monthly champions.   January:  Robinhood app.  What looks at first glance like a David-and-Goliath story played out in the final days of this month as a buying campaign for GameStop (GME). The rise of GME delivers a multi-billio...

  Nassim Taleb is refreshing because he writes on social phenomena in a way at a great distance from the usual platitudes of right and left, and that leaves him agreeing with one or the other in ways that seem fortuitous. I just finished reading SKIN IN THE GAME (2018).  The essential idea of the book is that one shouldn't take advice from anyone who doesn't stand to lose if the advice is wrong. Don't buy stock in Apple on the basis of a case made to you by someone who has no Apple in his own portfolio.  This is connected in Taleb's mind with the idea of "fat tails," extraordinary events that aren't at all as extraordinary as they "should" be under Bell-curve or Gaussian probability theory. A bell curve maps one dimension, which can be for example the earnings of Apple next year. The highest point is the most likely outcome. Some absurdly high number for Apple's earning would be the "tail" figure on one head, and bankruptcy-forcing ...

CNN is launching a streaming service for interviews with newsmakers. Chris Wallace, son of legendary television news reporter Mike Wallace, recently quit Fox News.  These two facts are related. Wallace announced his departure at the end of "Fox News Sunday," the closest thing Fox News has had lately to what would once have been considered a proper broadcast TV news show.  Wallace has moderated there since 2003. He ended his last broadcast telling hsi viewers he had had a "great ride" at Fox but was "ready for a new adventure." He did not then make it clear, but the adventure he had in mind was with CNN+, the new streaming service.  Good luck to you, if only for your old man's sake. If he is looking down upon us from some metaphysical analog of a cloud, I imagine he has seen your time with Fox News as an inexplicable detour.  Now, at last, you may be about the family business. 

At 8:23 p.m., Dec. 10, Larry Virden was at the Edwardsville facility, the now-destroyed Amazon warehouse in southern Illinois. He texted Cherie Jones, saying “Amazon won’t let me leave until after the storm blows over.” The tornado touched down 16 minutes later, at 8:39.  The arithmetic is maddening. It does appear that Virden could have gotten home had he left at that time. But it doesn't appear that management was being unreasonable. They did not know precisely when or whether a tornado was going to hit their facility. But they knew the danger was high, and that if it happened it would happen soon.   So they made the (reasonable) determination that their employees had a better chance of sheltering where they were than by taking to the roads. RIP Larry Virden. 

But of news from Seoul, in the Republic of Korea: a growing number of government officials are leaving their jobs and taking new more lucrative ones in the cryptocurrency industry. A member of parliament from the ruling party, Roh Woong-rae, has suggested stricter rules. Of course there is a problem here. Once a few government officials get better jobs in the crypto industry, others come to see their government services as a way to a golden job later in life. Will they then chance doing anything that would alienated their future bosses? Probably not. The corruption is clear enough even when there is no explicit quid pro quo .   Various solutions to this "revolving door" problem have been attempted in the U.S., and in other countries.  I won;t review them here. The bright reader will infer what my own solution is. 

She had a flair with vampire novels. And she saved vampire movies.   Indeed, one might say she resuscitated the genre, and its silver screen derivatives. The campiness of Leslie Nielson's Dracula: Dead and Loving It of 1995 might have seemed to put a stake in Bram Stoker's characters as objects of further Hollywood treatment.  But, if I may mix metaphors, the seed for a revival had already been planted. The year before that, 1994, Neil Jordan directed a motion picture adaptation of Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, taking a fresh look at the material. It was not at once a market sensation, despite the presence of Tom Cruise. It was not a sensation precisely because of the weariness of the movie-going public with the whole genre, the weariness that was soon to produce Nielson's act of desperation. And yet over time, in the years to come. the growth of Rice's influence would undo some of the damage that wear-and-tear had done to the whole thought space.    ...

  Last time I mentioned the election in Honduras I said that Xiomara Castro had won, but that her victory might well be contested. I have proved too pessimistic. The National Party has in fact conceded the election results and stepped aside. Castro will be sworn in on January 27.  Ah, I remember when things worked that smoothly in transfers of power in The United States. Where will things go now? Well ... the new President is a professed socialist, but I suspect that is mostly a matter of the marketing power of that label. [Yes, I know, it's marketing power in the US still seems negative outside of Vermont. Honduras is a different place, folks.]  What we know is that she has demanded a new deal from the International Monetary Fund in terms of her country's debt. I can hardly blame her and I have to observe that she doesn't have a great hand to play there. The IMF is simply a surrogate for global bond markets, and they are a stronger force than any momentum generated by an...

  Recently I wrote here about J oe Madison, a radio host with a show on Sirius XM Urban View, announced Nov. 8 that he will not eat solid food until, as he put it, “Congress passes, and President Biden signs,  the Freedom to Vote Act or the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.” Madison is still at it. He has been fasting for a month. Now he has some company. Twenty-two students are various Arizona colleges are fasting until such time as Senator Kyrsten Sinema agrees to support not only the Freedom to Vote Act but a filibuster carve-out for it.  Sinema is one of Arizona's two Senators. The other, Mark Kelly, is like her a Democrat but, unlike her, is a reliable vote supporting the initiatives of the leadership of the party, on voting rights and other matters. Sinema has been the Jo Manchin of the West, which is presumably why she has been targeted by this effort.  Joe Madison, like a certain kneeling quarterback in ancient days, might have started something big....

Five facts you might want to keep in mind about Devin Nunes' departure from the House of Representatives (to become the CEO of a company that may never really be a thing.) 1) The map of the 22d Congressional district of California, which Nunes represents, is about to be redrawn. It will become less deeply red. 2) Since Nunes is leaving at the end of this year, a special election will be held, before that redraw can be completed. This means that someone will represent that 22d for the final year of its existence in its current form, just long enough to be the incumbent for an effort at re-election within the new district in November.  3) It isn't obvious whether that incumbency in such a circumstance will create much advantage. So, between the redrawing and the special election, it looks as if the new 22d is primed to be a Dem pick-up in November. 4) Nunes has distinguished himself in office chiefly as the filer of meritless defamation lawsuits, one of them against a twitter acc...

The very existence of neutrinos is something that admirers of The Big Bang Theory (the television show, not the actual theory) might think of in terms of a conversation between Leonard and Sheldon.  The theoretical physicists (Sheldon Cooper's real-world colleagues) have been saying they exist for a long time now. Since a paper in 1930 by Wolfgang Pauli.  But the experimentalists (Leonard Hofstadter's tribe) have never been able to find one of the little buggers.  Now, it seems they have. Leonard has reported this and Sheldon has said "I told you so."  Heck, the Japanese built a huge facility specifically devoted to the detection of neutrinos, called the Super Kamiokande. In essence, it is a big tank of water with a lot of photomultiplier tubes in it. The tubes allow the physicists to watch for the predicted "Cherenkov radiation." Whatever that is supposed to be. It didn't help. Now, the credit for the key experimental observation goes to the Large Hadr...

  All these 'school shooting' stories are starting to look the same. Except perhaps for this one. Because with this one we get a controversy over the use of the word "bro." There was an active shooter in the halls of Oxford High. One particular classroom followed the protocol they had learned on 'shooter drills.' They sheltered in place -- locking the door, taping the windows. So far as I can tell, there was no teacher in the room at the time. One of the students seems to have been 'in charge.' Then came a knock on the door. The voice that presumably belonged to the knocker said that he was from the sheriff's office and "it's safe to come out."   In-charge guy, "We're not willing to take that risk right now." Voice from outside, "Come to the door and look at my badge, bro."  I'm impressed that the students in that class had the operational common sense to understand that sheriff's deputies don't cal...

  What kind of blogger would I be if I didn't have a thought about this subject? In my case the arguments on abortion before the Supreme Court last week sent me back, not to 1973, but to 1992.    It is worthwhile to note that 2021 this isn’t the first time  Roe  has seemed on the verge of demise. In 1992, after two Republican presidents over twelve years had made five Supreme Court appointments, there was a widespread expectation that the Court’s decision that year in  Planned Parenthood v. Casey  would overturn it. After all, both Reagan and Bush the elder had made a point of seeking jurists who would overturn Roe v. Wade .  A friend of mine was working for what one may call a junk mail processer at the time. He tells me that among the items of mail they processed was a call for donations from a pro-abortion rights group. The letter began, "The Supreme Court has just eliminated the constitutional protection for...." It asked for the money to figh...

 On November 28 the people of Honduras voted. They appear to have voted for  Xiomara Castro, of the Liberty and Refoundation Party (LIBRE), as their new President.  The election may well be stolen. We may soon find that the ruling party has manufactured enough votes to keep itself in power. Then there will arise the question of what, if anything, the Biden administration can do about that. But the margins of victory seems to be large, so the creation of later 'found' votes will have to be on a big scale.   There were three significant candidates for the office. In addition to Xiomara Castro, there was Nasry Asfura, the candidate of the ruling National Party and the mayor of the capital city, and Yani Rosenthal, of the Liberals. The nominees had each been chosen by party primaries in March. There is a fourth major party, known as the Savior Party, but its candidate, Salvador Nasralla, withdrew on October 13 to become Castro’s running mate. The Castro-Nasralla was...

  Suppose I put forward the following theory of history: human history (or American history, if I want to be specific) is chiefly about a struggle among the providers of various competing psychoactive ("addictive") substances. People who drink a lot of coffee and smoke a lot of tobacco have for a long time believed that they are doing it right and anybody else is doing mind-chemistry wrong. THAT is the key point. Let us call this Critical Pharmacology Theory. Considering contemporary politics, one thing I would be certain to be asked, were I to find any broad audience for this, would be: is this compatible with or at odds with Critical Race Theory. Leave aside the hookum about CRT as it is supposedly being taught in elementary school, or found in the works of Toni Morrison.  It isn't, and it can't be.  CRT used properly refers to a belief expounded upon by, say Derrick Bell or Richard Delgado. It is, so to speak, part of an intra-left debate. It followed upon and was ...