…Or no transition at all. On this past Saturday our high temperature was in the low 90s; today it is forecast to be in the mid-60s. Ushering in the cooler weather was about an hour of much needed rainfall (even with a little lightning and thunder) late Monday between about 11 PM and Midnight.
The air conditioners have finally been turned off, almost certainly until next year. No high temperatures even beginning with an “8” are in the immediate forecast and it is possible that on next Sunday our temps will not get out of the 50s and that it could rain most, or all, of the day. We have had a few days of respite from hot weather (your mileage may vary) since late September, but it has been a long summer.
Some, but thankfully not many, people think that Arizona is hot all year. Someone whose identity will not be revealed once asked me, in all seriousness, if it was going to be 100 degrees here that day; this question was asked in a February.
I have always been a weather nerd. Whether that condition is part of having OCD tendencies, I can’t say.
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Before I forget:
PLEASE click on the tiny “Read on blog” link or the post title itself in the email notifying you of a new post. Thanks.
WordPress’ decision to change the way the notification of a new post appears in an email has really hurt readership numbers. So much so, in fact, that I am likely to downgrade my plan. I don’t know what effect that will have on the appearance of this blog, but I do know I really am tired of “interacting” with WordPress “engineers.”
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“If you destroy a free market you create a black market. If you have 10,000 regulations you destroy all respect for the law.”
– Winston Churchill
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Speaking of markets, I will now link to the two stories I had mentioned yesterday by John Cochrane, AKA The Grumpy Economist, the Rose-Marie and Jack Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. In A Distillation of Nonsense, Cochrane severely criticized recent Nobel Prize recipient in Economics Daren Acemoglu for what he said in his recent interview in Times Of India. Here is Acemoglu’s response to a question about AI:
“We need to actively steer technological development in a direction that benefits broader swathes of humanity. This require a pro-human approach that prioritises enhancing worker productivity and autonomy, supporting democracy and citizen empowerment, and fostering creativity and innovation.
To achieve this, we need to: a) Change the narrative around technology, emphasising societal control and a focus on human well-being. b) Build strong countervailing powers, such as labour unions and civil society organisations, to balance the power of tech companies, and c) Implement policies that level the playing field, including tax reforms that discourage automation and promote labour, data rights for individuals and creative workers, and regulations on manipulative digital advertising practices.”
Here is Cochrane’s response:
“The language alone is infuriating. Who is this “we?” “A pro-human approach that prioritizes…” just who is doing what here?
The invisible subject is obvious. “We” and the hidden subject of passive voice means state control. And since AI development is an international competition, it means somehow stopping other countries from allowing their AI to develop in the direction of greatest usefulness.
Productivity is exactly what all profit-driven innovation achieves. But how do “we” increase productivity while simultaneously “discourag[ing] automation?” “Supporting democracy?” The same “we” who “steers” the private efforts, private investments, and private property of others to “democracy” is about the most anti-democratic vision I can imagine. Does anyone need to “steer” technology to “foster creativity and innovation?”
The tool is the regulatory state, law, and the industrial policy state. The first two can only forbid activity, reduce the choice set. The third can subsidize, but in practice serves to protect the status quo and political goals.”
Remember what Churchill said about the end of a free market leading to the creation of a black market. Of course, Acemoglu hasn’t always seemed off his rocker, in my opinion. Here is something he wrote in 2015, “If the US increased taxation to Denmark levels, it would reduce rewards for entrepreneurship, with negative consequences for growth and prosperity for the entire world.”
In Stagnation and Hope, Cochrane quotes a European friend about the draconian nature of EU regulation:
“The conference was largely about Germany’s economic challenges. You do not believe the burden imposed on firms via EU and German regulations in recent years. The aim of such regulations is to protect personal data, to protect birds, to protect trees in the whole world, to protect working conditions and avoid child labor in the world, force firms to have complete carbon emission accounts, including carbon emission from all the input they import from the whole world, to ensure cyber security, including of global firms that provide inputs.
I hear about firms that want to (continue to) import chocolate, coffee beans, meat into the EU, but cannot do so, as their traditional suppliers from Africa or Latin America cannot prove that the land they use to produce agricultural inputs for such product was not cleared of woodland within the last I think 4-5 years.
This is absolutely Kafkaesque. Everything is about morality, with very short-term thinking. Every lobby group seems allowed to push through its special interests, nobody seems to do a reasonable cost-benefit analysis, before such laws, regulations are drafted and voted.”
“Everything is about morality, with very short-term thinking. Every lobby group seems allowed to push through its special interests, nobody seems to do a reasonable cost-benefit analysis, before such laws, regulations are drafted and voted.” Sadly, we’re not too far from that in the US. Here’s the truth: Efficiency ALWAYS matters because resources are ALWAYS finite.
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This Hagerty article begins, “If you’ve been paying attention to the collector car market the past few months, it’s clear that the pandemic boom is over.” The piece is actually about five specific cars whose values have decreased significantly. Here are pictures of the two that interest me the most.
The car in the top photo is a Maserati Mistral. The one shown in the lower photo and below is one that “earned” inclusion in the next version of my Ultimate Garage, if it appears at all, because I couldn’t stop looking at the one offered for sale at the Mecum auction in Monterey in 2021.
I seriously doubt I will ever be able to afford a Ferrari 250 GT Pininfarina Coupe, but even if I could I couldn’t buy one because it only came equipped with a manual transmission. Even I would not restomod this car. Well, if somehow I wound up with a net worth in nine or ten figures…
#ARainyTransition