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Saturday assorted links
1. 101 things Leila would tell her past self.
2. “The colonel was then carried to the Dotonbori river and tossed into the murky water.”
3. Leadership lessons from Shakespeare’s Henriad.
4. Good thread on the Apple case.
5. Where do the major African economies stand? And fellowship in Tanzania.
DEI vs. the Chips Act
The Hill has a good op-ed by Matt Cole and Chris Nicholson on how labor and DEI regulations are strangling the CHIPS act. It’s somewhat over the top, failure is overdetermined, but this is an important op-ed and directionally correct.
The Biden administration recently promised it will finally loosen the purse strings on $39 billion of CHIPS Act grants to encourage semiconductor fabrication in the U.S. But less than a week later, Intel announced that it’s putting the brakes on its Columbus factory. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has pushed back production at its second Arizona foundry. The remaining major chipmaker, Samsung, just delayed its first Texas fab.
This is not the way companies typically respond to multi-billion-dollar subsidies. So what explains chipmakers’ apparent ingratitude? In large part, frustration with DEI requirements embedded in the CHIPS Act.
…The law contains 19 sections aimed at helping minority groups, including one creating a Chief Diversity Officer at the National Science Foundation, and several prioritizing scientific cooperation with what it calls “minority-serving institutions.” A section called “Opportunity and Inclusion” instructs the Department of Commerce to work with minority-owned businesses and make sure chipmakers “increase the participation of economically disadvantaged individuals in the semiconductor workforce.”
…Handouts abound. There’s plenty for the left—requirements that chipmakers submit detailed plans to educate, employ, and train lots of women and people of color, as well as “justice-involved individuals,” more commonly known as ex-cons. There’s plenty for the right—veterans and members of rural communities find their way into the typical DEI definition of minorities. There’s even plenty for the planet: Arizona Democrats just bragged they’ve won $15 million in CHIPS funding for an ASU project fighting climate change.
…tired of delays at its first fab, [TSMC]flew in 500 employees from Taiwan. This angered local workers, since the implication was that they weren’t skilled enough. With CHIPS grants at risk, TSMC caved in December, agreeing to rely on those workers and invest more in training them. A month later, it postponed its second Arizona fab.
Now TSMC has revealed plans to build a second fab in Japan. Its first, which broke ground in 2021, is about to begin production. TSMC has learned that when the Japanese promise money, they actually give it, and they allow it to use competent workers. TSMC is also sampling Germany’s chip subsidies, as is Intel.
Intel is also building fabs in Poland and Israel, which means it would rather risk Russian aggression and Hamas rockets over dealing with America’s DEI regime. Samsung is pivoting toward making its South Korean homeland the semiconductor superpower after Taiwan falls.
…The CHIPS Act’s current identity as a jobs program for favored minorities means companies are forced to recruit heavily from every population except white and Asian men already trained in the field.
Remember that there is an Extreme Shortage of High-IQ Workers. The United States is big and rich and can afford to handicap itself in many ways but less so when it comes to high-end semiconductor manufacturing, the most difficult and complicated manufacturing process ever attempted by human beings. For that we want the Dream Team, the very best, chosen on merit alone.
Addendum: Scott Lincicome has a good overview of the problem.
Friday assorted links
1. Virginia stadium deal might be dead.
2. More blue cities are backing anti-crime measures.
3. Mark Skousen reviews GOAT for Economic Affairs.
4. Lengthy JEL survey article on the productivity slowdown (AEA gate).
5. Weak showers do not necessarily save water.
6. Tehzeeb live sessions (music from Pakistan).
7. The secret door is the new trend? (NYT)
Saturday assorted links
1. Dutch waterworks.
2. Pseudo-currencies in Argentina.
4. Recommendations for understanding Eastern and Central Europe.
5. Ross D. on Ukraine aid (NYT).
6. BYD will set up an EV factory in northern Mexico. I am curious to see the policy response to that one.
Emergent Ventures winners, 32nd cohort
Anson Yu, Waterloo, telemetry devices that can detect compromised hardware devices to protect our electrical grid and other critical infrastructure.
Anshul Kashyap, Berkeley, neurotech and vision, to visit the Netherlands for work and research reasons.
Kieran Lucid, Dublin, Irish videos about YIMBY and aesthetics, at the site Polysee.
Matin Amiri, Antwerp, Afghanistan, and San Francisco (?), building digital clones.
Snowden Todd, USA and Honduras and South Korea, to write a book on South Korean fertility issues.
Anthony Jancso, Accelerate SF, San Francisco, for general career development.
Denisa Lepadatu, Romania and Bremen, trip to Prospera to pursue longevity research.
Jamie Rumbelow and Henry Dashwood, London, British company to ease land rights/permissions.
Anastasia Vorozhtsova, Columbia University, to study Russian education and the Russian state.
Rohan Selva-Radov, Oxford, general career development, and to develop a dating/matching service for young people.
Olga Yakimenko, Vienna, movie-making.
Rucha Benare, Dublin, Pune area, art and biology.
Brooke Bowman, San Francisco, Vibecamp.
Ruxandra Tesloianu, Cambridge/Romania, travel grant and career development, bio space, science, and meta-science.
Ukraine cohort:
Serhii Shadrin, to study at University of Chicago, and to study information manipulation and media.
Le Sallay Academy, school for Ukrainian refugees, including in France and Serbia, Sergey Kuznetsov and Aleka Molokova.
Here are previous winners of Emergent Ventures. Here is Nabeel’s software for querying about EV winners.
Be long energy infrastructure, find the truly scarce input there
Governments around the world are intensifying scrutiny on the building of data centres over fears that their huge energy usage is putting excessive pressure on national climate targets and electricity grids.
Ireland, Germany, Singapore and China as well as a US county and Amsterdam in the Netherlands have introduced restrictions on new data centres in recent years to comply with more stringent environmental requirements.
The threat to new projects is highest in Ireland, a hotspot for server farms built by cloud computing companies such as Google and Microsoft, because of its low tax rate and easy access to high-capacity subsea cables through which global internet traffic is run.
A decision by the country’s energy and water regulator in 2021 to limit new data connections to the electricity grid is now having a “material impact at the ground level”, said Hiral Patel, head of sustainable and thematic research at Barclays and lead author of a report on data centres.
Data centre operators Vantage, EdgeConneX and Equinix had permits for new projects in Dublin rejected by local authorities last year. Ireland’s data centres are set to account for 32 per cent of national electricity demand in 2026, the International Energy Agency forecast last month.
The environmental impact of data centres — huge facilities that hold the servers that create the online storage for the data of millions — has become a growing issue around the world.
Loudoun County in the US state of Virginia, and Germany have recently introduced curbs that include limiting permits for data centres in residential areas, or requiring them to contribute renewable energy to the grid and reuse waste heat.
Here is more from Kenza Bryan at the FT.
Will the Argentina province of La Rioja print its own currency?
Maybe so:
Milei’s austerity is biting hard in La Rioja, an olive and wine region home to 384,000 people — out of a population of 46mn — where intense heat pushes many businesses to take a siesta from 1 to 6pm. Almost 75 per cent of the province’s budget comes from redistributed taxes collected by the national government, and 67 per cent of registered workers are employed by the state.
The province’s finances had been “decimated” in recent months, governor Ricardo Quintela said in an interview, citing Milei’s halting of public works projects and his refusal to transfer the 20.8bn pesos ($26mn) that he says La Rioja is owed based on historical agreements with the central government…
In an effort to pay public workers, La Rioja’s state legislature, dominated by Quintela’s left-leaning Peronist movement, has approved a plan to issue 22.5bn pesos ($28mn) worth of so-called “bocades”. These provincial government bonds can be used to pay local taxes, bills for public services such as energy and water and — in theory — to buy goods from private companies. Bocades — nicknamed a “quasi-currency” in Argentina — will be used to top up public employees’ salaries by 30 per cent. Quintela said they would start to be issued within 90 days, though La Rioja may opt to issue them only digitally.
Quintela said that Bocades would be exchangeable for pesos at the provincially-owned bank. However, given the province’s scarce supply of pesos, the plan relies on “people starting to trust in the bonds’ value” so that they don’t exchange them immediately.
And:
Argentina’s provinces have dabbled in quasi-currencies before. In the early 2000s, amid a severe recession and several years of deflation, more than a dozen provinces including La Rioja issued bonds that functioned as currencies.
The logic of this is not surprising. When very strong disinflationary pressures are in place, liquidity is quite scarce. Suppliers will step into the void to try to supply it, even if the overall macroeconomic consequences are negative. Such “local currencies” were common in the 1930s, though most of them did not last long. Expect scrip and gift certificates to make a comeback as well, although this version of the idea transfers seigniorage to a very strapped local government.
Here is more from the FT.
Addendum: Congress just dealt with Milei agenda further setbacks.
Amsterdam urban engineering
An average of 18 people a year reportedly drown in the city’s canals: often men, late at night, falling to their deaths while apparently taking a “wild wee”.
Last week, councillors demanded answers to questions on water safety, prompted by the death of Sam van Grondelle, a 29-year-old Amsterdammer who disappeared in October and whose body was discovered three days later in the Veemkade waterway.
As part of a multibillion-euro renovation of the city, the authorities are putting in extra ladders and grab ropes along 200km of crumbling canal wall. However, most of the walls remain high, are poorly lit and are often flanked by an ankle-high “car rail” to stop vehicles rolling in. They form a perfect trip hazard for distracted wanderers.
The authorities are focused on: “…prevention techniques and safety campaigns in the UK and Ireland.” About ten percent of the drowned men had their flies open. Here is the full Times of London story.
The economics of illicit sand markets
Very few people are looking closely at the illegal sand system or calling for changes, however, because sand is a mundane resource. Yet sand mining is the world’s largest extraction industry because sand is a main ingredient in concrete, and the global construction industry has been soaring for decades. Every year the world uses up to 50 billion metric tons of sand, according to a United Nations Environment Program report. The only natural resource more widely consumed is water. A 2022 study by researchers at the University of Amsterdam concluded that we are dredging river sand at rates that far outstrip nature’s ability to replace it, so much so that the world could run out of construction-grade sand by 2050. The U.N. report confirms that sand mining at current rates is unsustainable.
And:
Most sand gets used in the country where it is mined, but with some national supplies dwindling, imports reached $1.9 billion in 2018, according to Harvard’s Atlas of Economic Complexity.
Companies large and small dredge up sand from waterways and the ocean floor and transport it to wholesalers, construction firms and retailers. Even the legal sand trade is hard to track. Two experts estimate the global market at about $100 billion a year, yet the U.S. Geological Survey Mineral Commodity Summaries indicates the value could be as high as $785 billion. Sand in riverbeds, lake beds and shorelines is the best for construction, but scarcity opens the market to less suitable sand from beaches and dunes, much of it scraped illegally and cheaply. With a shortage looming and prices rising, sand from Moroccan beaches and dunes is sold inside the country and is also shipped abroad, using organized crime’s extensive transport networks, Abderrahmane has found. More than half of Morocco’s sand is illegally mined, he says.
Of course these are usually unowned, unpriced resources:
Luis Fernando Ramadon, a federal police specialist in Brazil who studies extractive industries, estimates that the global illegal sand trade ranges from $200 billion to $350 billion a year—more than illegal logging, gold mining and fishing combined. Buyers rarely check the provenance of sand; legal and black market sand look identical. Illegal mining rarely draws heat from law enforcement because it looks like legitimate mining—trucks, backhoes and shovels—there’s no property owner lodging complaints, and officials may be profiting. For crime syndicates, it’s easy money.
Here is the full Scientific American piece by David A. Taylor.
Monday assorted links
1. Noah Smith on the California Forever Project.
2. Corporations defending DEI.
3. More on ice deposits on Mars? (speculative)
4. Larry speaks the truth about Harvard.
5. “A rich literature explores gender differences between men and women, but an increasing share of the population identifies their gender in some other way. Analyzing data on roughly 10,000 students and 1,500 adults, we find that such gender minorities are less confident and provide less favorable self-evaluations than equally performing men on a math and science test.” Link here.
6. These two cicada broods will emerge at the same time (NYT).
7. “Dana-Farber Cancer Institute is reviewing more than 50 papers, including work of the hospital’s CEO.” (WSJ) That is at Harvard.
Positive noises about Latin America
Latin America has two-thirds of world lithium reserves and about 40 per cent of its copper. It accounts for 45 per cent of global agrifood trade, according to the EU, and its abundant stock of farmland and water could allow that to grow much further. It is home to the world’s largest surviving rainforest, the Amazon, and its diverse geography includes some of the best locations on the planet to generate solar and wind power.
…It also enjoys some other, less obvious, advantages in today’s troubled world: its states are not at war with each other; it is more democratic than any other developing region; and it is building soft power — latino music, food, art, and films have global audiences. In addition, digital nomads cite Mexico City, Medellín and Buenos Aires as among the world’s best cities for remote working.
Here is more from Michael Stott at the FT. Of course these all remain open questions…
Is real estate in Roatan undervalued?
By a lot. I was briefly on the island, and also visited Próspera there (I thank my hosts for their time and efforts, and I believe Vitalia will be posting my session with them on-line, much of it covering life extension and crypto).
I have been to plenty of both Latin America and the Caribbean, and I was struck by how safe the island is. Most anything of significance is priced in dollars, and you can pay with dollars, even in small restaurants. The core language is English, although Spanish seems to be increasing rapidly, due to migration from the mainland, itself a good sign for Roatan. Population is about 100,000 on a small island, but I didn’t encounter any traffic problems. Electricity and water seemed to be reliable. The local seafood is of very high quality.
At the top end I found this home selling for over 3m. I was in Jonesville, an extremely charming small town right on the water with picture-perfect views. Here are some home and lot prices. Below 400k at the top end, something wonderfully placed for below 90k, and empty lots in the 70k range.
Much of the Caribbean I don’t find so attractive, as it can be too dry or scrubby, but Roatan is truly beautiful. The views from some parts of Próspera are among the best Caribbean views I have seen.
From conversation, I infer that better direct flight service and better facilities for private planes are holding back real estate prices in Roatan. Neither of those seem to be insurmountable problems. Maybe the Honduras label puts some people off?
For dining, by the way, eat the Garifuna offerings at Punta Gorda, such as Garifuna Living Foods.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Donation suggestions for economic growth.
3. Tiny homes in Austin (NYT).
4. Casey Handmer on alleviating water scarcity in the US Southwest.
5. Using an LLM as your operating system? And the video is here, I have been predicting this.
6. Hillsdale College update (NYT).
Back to the Future: Power Dishwashers!
Why do today’s dishwashers typically take more than 2 hours to run through a normal cycle when less than a hour was common in the past? The reason is absurd energy and water “conservation” rules. These rules, imposed on dish and clothes washers, have made these products perform worse than in the past, cleaning less well or much more slowly. One of the best things that the Trump administration did (other than Operation Warp Speed, of course) was creating a product class–superwashers!–that cleaned in under an hour and were not subject to energy and water conservation standards. The Biden administration reversed these rules but the 5th circuit just ruled that the reversal was “arbitrary and capricious.”
The ruling notes
…the record contains historical evidence that dishwasher cycle time has increased from around one hour at the advent of DOE’s conservation program to around two and a half hours in 2020. See CEI Petition, 83 Fed. Reg. at 17773–74. DOE does not appear to contest this data; in fact, DOE in 2020 appeared to agree that the frustratingly slow pace of modern dishwashers caused consumer substitution away from dishwashers and toward handwashing. See 2020 Dishwasher Rule, 85 Fed. Reg. at 68729; see also Record App’x 3 (noting consumers supported efficacious dishwashers by a margin of 2,200 to 16). And nothing wastes water and energy like handwashing: DOE itself estimated in 2011 that handwashing consumes 350% more water and 140% more energy than machine washing. See Record App’x 5 (citing U.S. Dep’t of Energy, Technical Support Document Docket EE-2006-STD-0127: National Impact Analysis 16 (2011), https://perma.cc/849K-NCX8).
…What did DOE say in response? Basically nothing: It acknowledged the concern and moved on. But bare acknowledgment is no substitute for reasoned consideration.
…the Repeal Rule is arbitrary and capricious for two principal reasons. (1) It failed to adequately consider appliance performance, substitution effects, and the ample record evidence that DOE’s conservation standards are causing Americans to use more energy and water rather than less. (2) It rested instead on DOE’s view that the 2020 Rules were legally “invalid”—but even if true, that does not excuse DOE from considering other remedies short of repealing the 2020 Rules in toto.
More generally AnechoicMedia on twitter wrote:
Water usage restrictions on home dishwashers are a complete non-issue from an environmental standpoint and our inability to overthrow this petty regime is why this country sucks. You cannot provide abundance and prosperity while retaining this wartime rationing mindset.
A position with which I wholeheartedly agree.
Emergent Ventures, 31st cohort
Clayton Haight, Waterloo, robotics and accelerating progress in hardware.
Hemanth Surya Ganesh, freshman at Dickinson College, also India, longevity research and general career support.
Lisa Wehden and Minn Kim. Plymouth accelerates innovation through faster and more transparent immigration services.
Pranav Konjeti, Richmond, VA, high school, to build out a web site on extracurricular activities.
Neel Redkar, UCLA, artificial photosynthesis.
Kevin Liu, Vancouver, cybersecurity.
Julie R. Vaughn, Cambridge, Mass., to study delaying menopause and epigenetic reproductive aging measures.
Grace Sodunke, Oxford, AI and general career development.
Anirudh Bharadwaj Vangara, with co-founder, Toronto. Sophomores in high school, to build a semantic search engine to match students with internship and other opportunities.
John Ervin Caldemeyer, UCLA, to translate Juan Marsé into English.
T.G. Hegarty, Cork, for on-line math education and Breakthrough Maths.
Elly Shin, San Francisco, formerly of Loyal, to research the possibility of extending menopause.
Harry O’Connor, Cork, Ireland, 17, robotics.
Mark Halka, Waterloo, robotics and robotic arms.
Ukraine cohort:
Kyiv School of Economics and Tymofiy Mylovanov, repeat winners, to support and cultivate talent in Ukraine.
Taisiia Karasova, AstroSandbox, to help sponsor the Ukrainian National internet-Olympiad on Astronomy.
Congratulations to all, and yes there are still more winners to be listed (I do these in batches). Here are lists of previous Emergent Ventures winners.