Engaging Articles of the Week
My reading list, and my fuse, are both quite short this week due to an irritating cold and an even more irritating public discourse arena. Get a grip people.
But anyway here are two standouts that you may absorb as you wish, both equally relevant in my eyes.
People are, not unreasonably, dumbfounded by Trump’s current actions and strategies. It’s almost funny, the range of reactions…the Trump Devotion Syndrome people are almost rapturously speechless (why oh why can’t they be speechless) over the God-like wisdom of what’s unfolding, while the Trump Derangement Syndrome patients are functionally losing their minds and I fear control of bodily functions at the perceived insanity of what is going on. And in between, many good folk are simply scratching their heads, watching the currents, and reading stuff. But what if I was to tell you that almost all of this strategy was laid out last year, for public viewing, and is now simply being executed? Stephen Miran, currently Trump’s chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, last year penned a paper called “A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global trading System”. While he notes early on in the paper that “This essay is not policy advocacy” and “My analysis reflects only my own views”, as it turns out, this document is a startlingly clear outline of what is being pursued now (across the board tariff strategies, etc.). However, you can also see where the divergences are happening: for example, Miran suggests gradually raising tariffs on China by something like 2 percent per month because this gradual ramp would allow economies to absorb them, and would “provide firms with clarity over the path for tariffs, which will help them make plans to deal with supply chain adjustments and moving production outside China.” Hmm, not everyone go the memo on that, but other aspects of the document are very illuminating. The last sentence is telling: “There is a path by which the Trump Administration can reconfigure the global trading and financial systems to America’s benefit, but it is narrow, and will require careful planning, precise execution, and attention to steps to minimize adverse consequences.” Or you can do it all in two weeks. Aka Lenny kills the puppy. Full paper here.
Last year, lost in the earth-shaking aftermath of the US election, on November 11 a neuroscientist published a fascinating article summarizing his research: the guy had taught rats to drive tiny little cars. He and his colleagues built little battery powered cars (not Teslas people, don’t go torching them, leave those rats alone) and taught the vermin to drive by “grasping a small wire that acted like a gas pedal.” Driven on by the prize at the end, a Froot Loop, rats soon learned to steer, but then showed another side to their character that we don’t appreciate sufficiently when bashing them with a shovel (farm life, sorry kids) – the buck-toothed motorists would even take a longer route if they were enjoying the ride to their destination. They also found that rats began driving faster when in enriched environments, the rat-equivalent of today’s plush interiors, though the interiors had to be specifically designed so that rats wouldn’t eat the wires. Hey look, one area where humans hold an advantage, we tend not to do that. This project, if you’d call it that, seems to be part of a wave of new research into rat psyches, including work being done to find out if rats have hope. I guess there is a lot of grad-school money floating around. Well, if these things get out into the wild, full of driving skills and hope, we might have a whole new sort of car thief to worry about. See, humans can still do things AI does not. Yay. Story here.
Hey look everyone loves pipelines now. Find out why that was inevitable in The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity – the energy story for those that don’t live in the energy world, but want to find out. And laugh. Available at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com.
Read more insightful analysis from Terry Etam here, or email Terry here.