J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 83

Bret Devereaux: Collections: Where Does My Main Battery G...

Bret Devereaux: Collections: Where Does My Main Battery Go? https://acoup.blog/2019/11/29/collections-where-does-my-main-battery-go/: 'This week, we���re going to have a bit of fun. We���re going to take a look at a science fiction ship design���the eponymous Battlestar Galactica���through the lens of some ship design principles developed for early dreadnoughts. We���re going to be talking about gun position.... These... issues���what sort of main battery to have, and where should it go���bedeviled naval design in the late 1800s and early 1900s, both before and for the first few years after the development of HMS Dreadnought (launched 1906).... Better loading systems and range-finding had improved accuracy (especially at long range) and rate of fire on the big guns, reducing the dependence of fast-firing secondaries (whose duties were, in many cases, offloaded onto escorting cruisers anyway), while improvements in battleship armor made it increasingly clear that anything less than the heaviest artillery was likely to be useless. Since all of the work was likely to be done by the main battery, it made sense to prioritize it more heavily.... There are a lot of really fascinating designs in the early years after Dreadnought and in terms of main battery layout.... Dreadnought cannot face all of her guns in any direction���of the five turrets, only four can fire to port or starboard (the two wing turrets being the problem here), only one turret can fire directly aft (due to the placement of the rear tower). In theory, three turrets can fire forward, but in practice���remember I said we���d come back to this���actually firing the wing guns directly forward was likely to blow out the conning tower (whoops���).... The South Carolina with just four double-turrets could put all four to either side, 2 to the aft and two to the fore, without any danger of accidentally blowing out her own conning tower. Now, there were some challenges for superfiring gun arrangements���taller turrets meant moving more mass up on the ship, bringing the center of gravity up and potentially destabilizing the entire ship. That, in turn, put a sharp limit to the number of turrets which could be ���stacked��� (typically just two). Which was just as well, because it rapidly became apparent that���forced to choose between more guns and bigger guns���bigger was generally the best option. While it took a few years to fully catch on, for battleships, superfiring gun layouts eventually dominated battleship design, because it allowed the ship in question to concentrate all of its big-gun anti-capital ship firepower on a single target...

#noted #2019-12-16

I believe Greg Leiserson does as well as anyone can to la...

I believe Greg Leiserson does as well as anyone can to lay out how the PWBM reaches the very odd conclusion that deficit reduction at full employment slows growth over the next decade. It is not coherent: Penn Wharton Budget Model: The Wealth Tax Debate https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/events-1/2019/11/14/the-wealth-tax-debate: 'Presidential candidates such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have proposed taxes on wealth. Why a wealth tax? Will it likely raise the money they hope? What are the trade-offs? What has been the experience of other countries?... Kimberly Burham... Greg Leiserson... Richard Prisinzano... Natasha Sarin...

#noted #2019-12-15

MSW: The Black Watch at Fontenoy https://weaponsandwarfar...

MSW: The Black Watch at Fontenoy https://weaponsandwarfare.com/2019/07/14/the-black-watch-at-fontenoy/: 'off they went at the double led by Lieut.-Col. Sir Robert Munro, and stormed forward against the French positions about Fontenoy with tremendous spirit and elan. The French, protected by field fortifications and in considerable strength, were much shaken by this unusual attack launched by Highland furies armed ��� thanks to the granting of a request that this day they should fight with their native weapons ��� with broadsword and targe. Over the first line of entrenchments poured the Highlanders, but the French musketry was sustained and deadly and many of them fell and died before the fortifications. After a bitter struggle the Highlanders had to retreat, carrying with them the Lieutenant-Colonel, a man of such tremendous girth that he stuck in one of the entrenchments and barely escaped being made prisoner.... [Later] the Highlanders and another battalion were detailed to cover the inevitable retreat, a difficult duty even though there was no sustained pursuit, and the regiment was singled out for special praise by Cumberland in his report of the battle....

#noted #2019-12-14

*Charles Stross: Artificial Intelligence: Threat or Menac...

*Charles Stross: Artificial Intelligence: Threat or Menace? http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2019/12/artificial-intelligence-threat.html: 'Changes happen faster, and there are more disruptive unknown-unknowns hitting us from all quarters with every passing decade. This is a long-established trend: throughout most of recorded history, the average person lived their life pretty much the same way as their parents and grandparents. Long-term economic growth averaged less than 0.1% per year over the past two thousand years. It has only been since the onset of the industrial revolution that change has become a dominant influence on human society. I suspect... 85% of the world of 2029 is here today, about 10% can be anticipated, and the random, unwelcome surprises constitute up to 5% of the mix. Which is kind of alarming, when you pause to think about it...

#noted #2019-12-14

Wikipedia: 2019 United Kingdom General Election https://e...

Wikipedia: 2019 United Kingdom General Election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_United_Kingdom_general_election: 'Boris Johnson: Conservative: 43.6%. Jeremy Corbyn: Labour: 32.1%. Jo Swinson: Liberal Democrats: 11.6%. Nicola Sturgeon: SNP: 3.9%...

#noted #2019-12-14

Elimination of "the influence of the working-class moveme...

Elimination of "the influence of the working-class movement" understood as demands for equitable growth and limitations on inequality, yes. Elimination of "democracy", no. As Hitler is claimed by Hermann Rauschning to have said, "Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings!" Fascists are very happy to have majorities on their side. Today's Republican Party which seeks to rule as a minority is an anomaly. Boris Johnson is not unhappy that he beat Jeremy Corbyn by 14%-points in the December 12, 2019 British general election. And Adler's assumption that there is a ruling class is naive. Fascism can be turned to serve the interests of an economically dominant class, yes; but it can also be turned to serve the interests of other groups defined and that define themselves in other ways:

Rakesh Bhandari: 'Max Adler on fascism https://twitter.com/postdiscipline/status/1205721944126939137: "The conscious exploitation of all the various currents of discontent, declassement and worker-hatred, as well, of course, as antisemitism, to construct a movement by means of which, despite the opaque and mutually antagonistic interests of these various groups, democracy and with it the influence of the working-class can be eliminated." The autonomy of the fascist state from all classes is illusory: "When government appears to free itself from the interests of particular classes, even of the ruling class, and become, as it were, common property in its relations to everyone without exception. this process of dissociation in actual fact only takes place in the minds of those who believe in it"...

#noted #2019-12-14

Note to Self: A historical question I want answered: Some...

Note to Self: A historical question I want answered: Some historical questions I want to find the answers to: What was the typical pre-agricultural density of hunter-gatherer populations?

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#economichistory #notetoself

Galaxy Quest E! Documentary: For the Weekend

Author: Galaxy Quest E! Documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjT0KWn6T7I&feature=emb_logo:

#fortheweekend #sciencefiction #video

Michael Nielsen: Notes on the Dynabook http://mnielsen.gi...

Michael Nielsen: Notes on the Dynabook http://mnielsen.github.io/notes/kay/dynabook.html: 'Computing as envisioned circa 1960: "The only surviving computing system paradigm seen by MIT students and faculty was that of a very large International Business Machine in a tightly sealed Computation Center: the computer not as a tool, but as a demigod."���Wesley Clark.... Alan Kay's "A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages" (1972, what I'll call ���the Dynabook paper���): Many of the ideas in the Dynabook paper now appear commonplace, even banal. That's because those ideas won. At the time, this kind of thinking was a big change in perspective from computers-as-demigods. The Dynabook paper (and related work) was posing a fundamental new question: what might personal computing for everyone be? By facing squarely up to this (and some related) questions, PARC invented much of the foundation for modern personal computing...

#noted #2019-12-13

Back late in the decade of the 2000s, Barry Eichengreen o...

Back late in the decade of the 2000s, Barry Eichengreen opined that China's middle-9nc0me trap growth slowdown might began... now... Barry Eichengreen: Escaping the Middle-Income Trap https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4d9b/9d3f8041e4bc9e133182180ea2a5d85b11a5.pdf: 'Growth slowdowns typically occur at per capita in- comes of 16,700. At that point, the per capita growth rate slows from 5.6 percent to 2.1 percent, or by an average of 3.5 percentage points. For purposes of comparison, note that China���s per capita GDP, in constant 2005 international (purchasing power parity) prices, was 8,500 in 2007. Extrapolating its growth rate between then and now, China will reach the threshold value of 15,100 around 2016���that is to say, five years from now...

...There are multiple reasons to doubt that high growth in a relatively poor developing country will continue forever. Growth in late-developing countries is associated with a demographic transition that yields a dividend in its early stages but a penalty later.... This demographic dividend has been especially important in East Asia because the demographic transition there began earlier than in Southeast and South Asia and because it was compressed in time.... Then there is the fact that fast growth in developing countries is typically associated with the transfer of workers from underemployment in the rural sector to employment in urban manufacturing, something else that cannot continue forever.... Growth slowdowns are almost always total factor productivity (TFP) growth slowdowns.... This said, there is no iron law of slowdowns. There is considerable dispersion in the income levels at which they occur. Mean per capita income may be 16,700, as noted earlier, but the standard deviation is 6,000. The minimum is 10,000, the maximum 40,000... This variation, especially at the upper end, reflects the presence of influential outliers.... Hong Kong and Singapore.... Small open economies can grow by exporting without creating tensions with their partners or turning the terms of trade against themselves. They can rely on imported labor.... None of these conditions apply to large open econo- mies, including the country of special concern in this context, China...

#noted #2019-12-13