What I learned playing 30+ years’ worth of Jeopardy! video games Ars Technica Indonesia Boeing 737 passenger plane crash site found, navy says BBC Effective leaders ‘rise to the occasion’: The Carlyle Group’s David Rubenstein World Economic Forum See you in hell, punk London Review of Books Moynihan Train Hall czar killed himself as pressure […]
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Yves here. Oops. Covid is killing auto sales. Concerns about the direction of the economy, fewer car rentals due to a big decline in business and personal travel and reduced commuting might have something to do with that. Oddly, one of my friends in the auto supply business who has Mercedes and Toyota among her […]
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By Lambert Strether of Corrente I first wrote about robot cars back in 2016, in “Self-Driving Cars: How Badly Is the Technology Hyped?” (“Spoiler alert: Pretty badly”). Back then shady operators like Musk (Tesla), Kalanick (Uber), Zimmer (Lyft), and even the CEO of Ford were predicting Level 5 autonomous vehicles — I prefer “robot cars,” […]
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Yves here. The headline might be read by some as implying that Uber and Lyft are redeemable. Their untenable economics say otherwise. And remember, the author, as the proponent of a way to reduce the precarity of gig work, has to give Uber and others the benefit of the doubt, regardless of what he may […]
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This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. 1725 donors have already invested in our efforts to combat corruption and predatory conduct, particularly in the financial realm. Please join us and participate via our donation page, which shows how to give via check, credit card, debit card, or PayPal. Read about why we’re doing this fundraiser,what we’ve […]
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This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. 1295 donors have already invested in our efforts to combat corruption and predatory conduct, particularly in the financial realm. Please join us and participate via our donation page, which shows how to give via check, credit card, debit card, or PayPal. Read about why we’re doing this fundraiser, what […]
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Lambert here: They call it an investment vehicle because it’s designed to drive off with your money. By Wolf Richter, editor of Wolf Street. Originally published at Wolf Street. Shares of the electric truck maker Nikola that hasn’t made a single truck — not even a working prototype that uses its own technology — started […]
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Yves here. Covid-19’s impact upon local and regional economies depends very much on pre-existing conditions. For instance, California’s destructive wildfires are even worse than they would otherwise be due to dependence on prison labor…which now has such a high level of infection that there are pretty much no conscript firemen. One former strength of many […]
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A new study published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Public Health (hat tip reader ma) gives more granular insight into the triggers of so-called deaths of despair, as in the AIDS-level rise of deaths of the middle aged with high-school-only educations. We’ve embedded the study at the end of this post; the data supplement […]
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Yves here. I hate to sound like a Luddite, but the idea of global production, in the form of China as the world’s manufacturer, was never sustainable. I am still gobsmacked that Western multinational and tech execs would make their operations hostage to a country where they have no influence over their government, and that […]
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Yves here. For those who didn’t grow up in the era of good union-protected manufacturing jobs, it’s hard to convey adequately how different things were then. Blue collar workers could buy a house and a car, support a stay-at-home wife, and often also afford a recreation luxury, like a boat or a cabin. Those manufacturing […]
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Yves here. One of the reasons the so-called Nafta 2.0 was touted as better than its predecessor was that it contained protections for labor bargaining rights in Mexico. The argument was that stronger labor rights in Mexico would reduce the level of labor arbitrage and hence the harm to US workers. The deal has only […]
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