Dwayne Day has an interesting article on the degree to which the space station can be considered a success, but I would have thought that he knew that it was mostly made of aluminum and composites–very little steel involved.
A Sideshow?
Roger Cohen asks if Europe matters any more:
At a recent meeting here of the Council for the United States and Italy, a group that brings together influential folk from both sides of the Atlantic, America’s often withering view of Europe was as clear as the light on the lagoon.
That view may be summarized as follows: a Continent reluctant to spend on defense, offering only “postmodernist” armies useful enough as peacekeepers but next to useless as warriors, given to earnest blah-blah about the pre-eminence of international law, inhabited by a declining and evermore aged citizenry living in overregulated economies that have not shown significant growth for at least five years.
Contrast that image with another offered at the meeting: that of an India growing at over 7 percent a year, inhabited by more than 500 million people under the age of 25, busy buying hundreds of advanced aircraft, convinced that armies are still created to fight, churning out English-speaking high-tech graduates by the million each year, and persuaded by Islamic terrorism that its strategic goals and America’s are often identical or at least complementary.
So, which of these parts of the world is more worthy of the attention of the United States? Which is a compelling affair: the intensifying and fast-changing relationship with India, or the largely stagnant alliance with Europe that served above all a cold-war strategic challenge now overcome?
Don’t Quota Me
Chinese apparel have been slapped with a quota. Quotas are worse than tariffs, but first here’s a little background.
The rash of China bashing is well-timed to keep the Chinese buying dollars according to Yuan Answers? (WSJ, 6/10, subscription required). A triangular trade where US sends dollars and st0ck and title deeds overseas to the rich savers of the world and imports lots of stuff in one way shipping containers from China is not a bad thing. In fact, it can be sustained indefinitely with the US capital st0ck continuing to grow. It is a testament to how our laws are not quite as bad as everyone else’s.
In economics we talk about how tariffs and quotas both imply a “deadweight social loss”. When prices are artificially raised via a tariff, the customer prices rise and the supplier prices fall. The quantity sold also falls. It is this last part that is the first component of deadweight loss. By reducing the quantity sold, profitable trades without the tariff become unprofitable because they are not profitable enough to beat the “spread” between the supplier and customer prices induced by the tariff. All this is Economics 101.
A quota has an additional element beyond this kind of loss. In a quota, the supply price rises too. That means that any supplier who can produce at the new higher price will try to fulfill their quota. Thus suppliers who would have cut back production under a tariff will continue to produce to fulfill their quota. Everyone is cut back pro-rata (or according to some formula, e.g., 7.5% more than last year even if growth would otherwise be 500%) and not according to who is the most efficient. Coase might say that quota shares could be traded, but this entails higher transactions expense than the decentralized trade that occurs with a competitive market price.
The additional inefficiency is happily born by international suppliers who receive a major benefit when a quota is imposed–higher prices. So the quota is a collusive bargain between the Government, the domestic suppliers and the foreign suppliers to raise prices on the consumers at the cost to the economy of two kinds of deadweight social loss. Diffuse harm, concentrated benefit. Can one file a class action law suit against an industry association that lobbies for selfish policy?
Don’t Quota Me
Chinese apparel have been slapped with a quota. Quotas are worse than tariffs, but first here’s a little background.
The rash of China bashing is well-timed to keep the Chinese buying dollars according to Yuan Answers? (WSJ, 6/10, subscription required). A triangular trade where US sends dollars and st0ck and title deeds overseas to the rich savers of the world and imports lots of stuff in one way shipping containers from China is not a bad thing. In fact, it can be sustained indefinitely with the US capital st0ck continuing to grow. It is a testament to how our laws are not quite as bad as everyone else’s.
In economics we talk about how tariffs and quotas both imply a “deadweight social loss”. When prices are artificially raised via a tariff, the customer prices rise and the supplier prices fall. The quantity sold also falls. It is this last part that is the first component of deadweight loss. By reducing the quantity sold, profitable trades without the tariff become unprofitable because they are not profitable enough to beat the “spread” between the supplier and customer prices induced by the tariff. All this is Economics 101.
A quota has an additional element beyond this kind of loss. In a quota, the supply price rises too. That means that any supplier who can produce at the new higher price will try to fulfill their quota. Thus suppliers who would have cut back production under a tariff will continue to produce to fulfill their quota. Everyone is cut back pro-rata (or according to some formula, e.g., 7.5% more than last year even if growth would otherwise be 500%) and not according to who is the most efficient. Coase might say that quota shares could be traded, but this entails higher transactions expense than the decentralized trade that occurs with a competitive market price.
The additional inefficiency is happily born by international suppliers who receive a major benefit when a quota is imposed–higher prices. So the quota is a collusive bargain between the Government, the domestic suppliers and the foreign suppliers to raise prices on the consumers at the cost to the economy of two kinds of deadweight social loss. Diffuse harm, concentrated benefit. Can one file a class action law suit against an industry association that lobbies for selfish policy?
Don’t Quota Me
Chinese apparel have been slapped with a quota. Quotas are worse than tariffs, but first here’s a little background.
The rash of China bashing is well-timed to keep the Chinese buying dollars according to Yuan Answers? (WSJ, 6/10, subscription required). A triangular trade where US sends dollars and st0ck and title deeds overseas to the rich savers of the world and imports lots of stuff in one way shipping containers from China is not a bad thing. In fact, it can be sustained indefinitely with the US capital st0ck continuing to grow. It is a testament to how our laws are not quite as bad as everyone else’s.
In economics we talk about how tariffs and quotas both imply a “deadweight social loss”. When prices are artificially raised via a tariff, the customer prices rise and the supplier prices fall. The quantity sold also falls. It is this last part that is the first component of deadweight loss. By reducing the quantity sold, profitable trades without the tariff become unprofitable because they are not profitable enough to beat the “spread” between the supplier and customer prices induced by the tariff. All this is Economics 101.
A quota has an additional element beyond this kind of loss. In a quota, the supply price rises too. That means that any supplier who can produce at the new higher price will try to fulfill their quota. Thus suppliers who would have cut back production under a tariff will continue to produce to fulfill their quota. Everyone is cut back pro-rata (or according to some formula, e.g., 7.5% more than last year even if growth would otherwise be 500%) and not according to who is the most efficient. Coase might say that quota shares could be traded, but this entails higher transactions expense than the decentralized trade that occurs with a competitive market price.
The additional inefficiency is happily born by international suppliers who receive a major benefit when a quota is imposed–higher prices. So the quota is a collusive bargain between the Government, the domestic suppliers and the foreign suppliers to raise prices on the consumers at the cost to the economy of two kinds of deadweight social loss. Diffuse harm, concentrated benefit. Can one file a class action law suit against an industry association that lobbies for selfish policy?
Don’t Panic
Jim Oberg says that too many people are hyperventilating over space weapons.
Don’t Panic
Jim Oberg says that too many people are hyperventilating over space weapons.
Don’t Panic
Jim Oberg says that too many people are hyperventilating over space weapons.
Women Should Feel Lucky
…that they have org@sms. If they do. Because they don’t need them, evolutionarily speaking.
That’s the shorter version of what Lisa Lloyd says, anyway. In a cool new blog I discovered via Carl Zimmer, called Philosophy of Biology.
Better Than Nanopants
The brushes can be used for sweeping up nano-dust, painting microstructures and even cleaning up pollutants in water.
The bristles’ secret is carbon nanotubes, tiny straw-like molecules just 30 billionths of a metre across.
This is pretty cool, but it remain irritating that the prefix “nano” has come to mean the scale of the objects themselves, rather than the scale at which they are built. That’s why Eric Drexler had to abandon “nanotechnology” and come up with the phrase “molecular manufacturing” to represent his concepts for precise placement of atoms in building objects both small and large.
[Via Geek Press]