The Sixth Industrial Revolution -- November 11, 2024

Japan: Society 5.0.

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The Sixth Industrial Revolution

See wiki, as currently understood and generally accepted:

• first industrial revolution: 1760 - 1840; ended in the middle of the 19th century; inventions; advancements in textiles; age of inventions;
  
• second industrial revolution: advancements in manufacturing processes; 1870 - 1914 (beginning of WWI); age of mass manufacturing;
  
• third industrial revolution: beginning in 1947, information age; computer coming out of WWII; Colossus, Bletchley Park;
  
• fourth industrial revolution: rapid technological advancement beginning in the late 1990s; the Age of Apple (or the personal computer).
  

Much better:

• first industrial revolution: ended in the middle of the 19th century; age of invention;
  
• second industrial revolution: 1870 - 1914 (beginning of WWI); age of Henry Ford, mass manufacturing;
  
• third industrial revolution: peri-WWI -- the age of conventional manufacturing and logistics; rise of synthetics and the oil and gas industry; age of Standard Oil (or the age of John D Rockefeller);
  
• fourth industrial revolution: beginning in 1947, information age; the computer age (or the age of Turing);
  
• fifth industrial revolution: rapid technological advancement beginning in the late 1990s -- maybe it began in 1984 with the (in)famous Apple commercial; age of Apple (or the age of Steve Jobs)
  

The question is whether "we" have entered the sixth industrial revolution: Nvidia blades; LDCs; a return to nuclear energy to meet energy needs of the information age. If so:

•  sixth industrial revolution: artificial intelligence enters its stride; the "Nvidia revolution."

It's hard for me to accept that the need for nuclear energy to meet the needs of LDCs does not signify a new industrial revolution.

Note: "the Nvidia revolution" is a metonym for the artificial intelligence advancements that began in the early 2020s. 

US House -- Status -- November 11, 2024

Link here. 

Updates

9:48 p.m. CT, November 11, 2024: from eighteen to sixteen too close to call; still being counted since earlier today. DEMs pick up two seats (expected outcomes). Of the sixteen too close to call, still eight leaning Republican and at least four look pretty locked in for Republicans -- 214 + all eight would give the US House 222 seats. Again, 218 needed for majority.

Original Post 

Needed for majority: 218.

As it stands now: 214 GOP.

Eighteen seats too close to call and votes still being counted.

Of the eighteen, eight are very likely to go to the GOP.

But of the eight, only four are needed for a majority.

The reason why the majority is important: the committee chairs decide which issues / bills come before the committee.

If the Dems take the majority, in addition to all other legislation, they can bring up articles of impeachment for committee action. Although unlikely to go anywhere, they would slow things down, clutter the calendar, distracting from the business that Trump would like to see acted upon.

A lot of the GOP House members are RINO and/or "never Trumpers" so a lot of Trump's legislation will be watered down or won't get through the House at all. 

Regardless of how "it" goes, it beats the alternative.

The Culture Wars -- The New York Times Comes Clean On This -- November 11, 2024

 Link here.

3. Culture wars

Democrats hoped that Republican extremism on abortion would swing millions of votes. That didn’t happen partly because many voters see each party as too extreme in its own ways.

Many voters do worry about the Republican Party’s opposition to abortion, its dismissal of climate change and its support for book bans. But the same voters worry that Democrats are hostile to policing, obsessed with race and gender and opposed to oil and gas.

The Democrats who won hard races portrayed themselves as occupying the reasonable middle — what Golden called “Maine common sense.”

They criticized Republicans as wrong on abortion, but only as a secondary campaign theme. They embraced the police and the military, running ads with people in uniform. On the environment, the candidates tried to claim the center; Kaptur called out corporations that “pollute our Great Lakes,” while Golden boasted that he had opposed electric-vehicle mandates. Gluesenkamp Perez voted against Biden’s cancellation of college debt, a policy that many working-class people find unfair.

And now?

I spent a lot of time this year tracking the Democratic campaigns in swing states and districts, and I was repeatedly struck by how similar their messages were. They were feisty, populist and patriotic. They distanced themselves from elite cultural liberalism. They largely ignored Trump.

At the end of her interview with Gluesenkamp Perez, my colleague Annie asked whether the party could change. “It’s a lot easier to look outward, to blame and demonize other people, instead of looking in the mirror and seeing what we can do,” Gluesenkamp Perez replied. “So who knows?”

But if Democrats are looking for a successful playbook, they already have the beginnings of one.

The Economy -- The NY Times Comes Clean -- November 11, 2024

 Link here.

2. The economy

Democrats who won tough races ran to the left on economic issues. They sounded like blue-collar populists, fed up with high prices, slow wage growth, corporate greed and unfair Chinese competition. Harris, by contrast, sounded like an establishment centrist, even citing a Goldman Sachs report during her debate with Trump.

Slotkin, the senator-elect in Michigan, spoke of how her mother had been “gouged by the insurance companies.” In one of Golden’s ads, he cracked open a lobster with his hands while promising to lower health care costs. In two difficult upstate New York races, Josh Riley called for tariffs and blasted corporate greed, while Pat Ryan focused on high housing costs, my colleague Nicholas Fandos notes.

A screen grab from Jared Golden’s campaign ad.

In Ohio, Kaptur said the following: “They’re ruining our country — the billionaires and corporations who send our jobs overseas. Their religion is greed, and their Bible is corporate profits.” Senator Sherrod Brown offered a similar message in Ohio and lost — yet ran 7 percentage points ahead of Harris.

This populism was not purely progressive, though. It also tried to address voters’ concerns about the Democratic Party’s fondness for big government. Golden, for example, criticized “Biden’s aggressive spending agenda.” Baldwin bragged about protecting a small Wisconsin cheesemaker against federal regulations. The common strand was opposition to concentrated power, be it from big businesses, foreign governments or Washington.

Immigration: From The New York Times -- After The Harris Debacle -- November 11, 2024

Link here.

1. Immigration

Many Democrats have been in denial about immigration. Some initially argued that immigration didn’t soar under President Biden. Others claimed Biden’s policies weren’t the cause. Still others dismissed concerns about strained social services and crowded schools as Republican misinformation. (Many Republicans, to be clear, did tell lies about immigrants.)

But Biden did spark a huge immigration wave. He encouraged more people to come to the U.S. and loosened entry rules. Sure enough, immigration surged to its highest levels in many decades.

Source: Congressional Budget Office | By The New York Times

If anyone doubted Biden’s role, more proof came this year when he tightened policy, and immigration plummeted.

The Democrats who won tough races recognized that their party had lost credibility on this issue. In one of Kaptur’s ads, she called out “the far left” for “ignoring millions illegally crossing the border.” In a Gallego ad, he said, “Arizonans know — on the border, there is no plan.”

Harris’s campaign emphasized border security, too, but she was Biden’s vice president and had spent the 2020 campaign calling for many of the changes he implemented. She never explained why she changed her mind. Biden hasn’t explained his reversal, either.

 

Cisco, Nvidia, Intel -- August 10, 2024

About a month ago a meme starting appearing on twitter, elsewhere: comparing Nvidia's stock performance to that of Cisco during the dot-com boom / bubble.

In fact, one wonders if the meme was focusing on the wrong tech company.

Link here.

Nvidia's Performance Each Full Year Since Going Public -- August 10, 2024

Link here.