Jay Ackroyd will be interviewing us in world. If you have a Second Life account, hope to see you there, at:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Virtually%20Speaking/167/100/25
If you can’t be in world, you can listen on Blog Talk Radio at http://virtuallyspeaking.ning.com/
And if you miss it, it will be archived at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/virtuallyspeaking
Before us, at 7:30 PM EST there will be music. Duo Appassionato – Violinists Izabela Spiewak (Izabela Jaworower) and Xi Yang (Young Zeid) play Vivaldi’s *complete* Four Seasons.
Mandos
I’m hearing you on BTR (I don’t have a Second Life account).
Mandos
The show sounds refreshingly homemade 🙂
Mandos
Disagree with Stirling on China—I think that the Chinese have a much clearer idea of their limits, and when they have to step off the trade imbalance treadmill.
Mandos
This “fear of Communism” bit is kind of meh. Next!
Mandos
Your claim that there are no chip manufacturing plants in the USA is not quite true (ie, it is false):
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/10/intel_capital_investments/
Mandos
Browser crash, and now the BTR app doesn’t work for me after a restart. (Permanent buffering.). I gather there’s 30 min left, but try as I might I can’t get back on again.
Anyway, good chat. Needless to say, I agree with the bulk of both your and Stirling’s points. Re the populist right, I’m not sure what was meant by the idea that the left/right populist division is based on fake issues or whatever the term was.
Ian Welsh
There were some serious technical issues. Not sure what they were, I’ve been on before without problems.
Good to know on the chips, thanks. Misremembered. According to Elkus
“Of the top semiconductor manufacturing companies in the owlrd in 2007 , 16 spent more than 1 billion on capital equipment. Only four of the sixteen are U.S. companies. Two of them are, AMD and Sandisk, will make the bulk of their investment outside the US…. Of the sixteen largest spenders, Asia supports ten, the United States 4 and Europe 2.
(Trendline is the percentage of spending in the US drops every year).
lambert strether
Hi, Ian. Is there a transcript?
Eric Gen
Thanks Ian! I just listened to the podcast. It’s always nice to continue fleshing out the people that you’ve been reading for years. It was really a pleasure to get to hear both you and Stirling.
Have you and Stirling, and possibly others (Numerian, tjfxh, Sean-Paul, …), considered making podcasts together? It would be really interesting to hear y’all discuss various things. The technology for podcasts has gotten much simpler and I suspect that Stirling, with all of his musical recording expertise, could handle any technical issues that arose. I seem to recollect (perhaps wrongly?) that you can post podcasts on iTunes for free (not actually sure what the terms are). if so, that would offload any hosting costs.
Anyway, thanks again!
Ian Welsh
No transcript, I’m afraid.
lambert strether
Damn. Transcripts can be searched on, quoted, linked… There’s a lot to be said for rugged, simple technologies like chat.
Ian Welsh
Yes, I would prefer a transcript, but it’s a matter of time and money. Transcribing an hour long show take quite a bit of time.
Mark Holbrook
What’s the incredible cello music at the beginning of the program?
Thank you for some valuable insights. The Sino-american dealer/junkie metaphor especially striking. How does one get out of that with a minimum of human suffering?
Ian Welsh
Vivaldi’s four seasons, performed by Violinists Izabela Spiewak (Izabela Jaworower) and Xi Yang (Young Zeid)
Ideally Chinese are encouraged to move to a consumer society while at the same time the US is encouraged to move towards being more of a production society, and reduces its need for various imports, including oil. It could be managed if both sides wanted to.
Mark Holbrook
Thank you (on both counts). So…transforming this trend might mean US consumers wouldn’t be the first in the world to acquire whatever the next bauble (e.g. iPod, iPhone, etc.) is. People in other countries – esp. China – would have more purchasing power. That would be fine with me. Less fuel consumption is a big problem, I imagine…but an opportunity to invest massively in public transportation. Is there any political traction for this within our (current) governing class? And do you think it could be ‘sold’ to the public? Pity the MSM is so attached to metrics like GDP.
I read in the Independent that China is slowly moving to move to a ‘basket’ of currencies instead of purely T-bonds, but don’t know if that’s accurate. I guess that should nudge us in the right direction…hope so.
Ian Welsh
There is little traction on the US side–at least to do it smart. They are aware of China’s level of willingness to subsidize America and have told the Chinese that Americans will live within bounds (for example, Geithner promising the savings rate would stay positive). There is some traction on the Chinese side as well.
There is no traction to make it nice for the US. What the US should be doing is a determined transition to a new industrial base, where energy is a capital good, telecommuting is the norm for jobs that can allow it, and so on. That’s not happening.
Eric Gen
As far as potential transcripts go, have they considered trying speech to text software? I haven’t used any of this personally, but it’s purported to have gotten much better and much cheaper. There’s a free well-regarded (at least technically, there are apparently some privacy issues with the app) speech to text app for the iPod touch/iPhone platform.
Given the different microphone levels the three of you each had it could possibly have some difficulties doing the conversion. But, it would likely get the bulk of the conversion done and then require minimal manual editing.
Mark Holbrook
where energy is a capital good
Not sure what you mean. It’s a commodity, I understand that. What do you mean and how would it work (if you have time…)? Thank you.
Ian Welsh
Right now energy is something we dig up more than make (the bottleneck is extraction). Capital energy would be energy we make iwth resources that aren’t bottlenecked (ie. not hydrocarbons). So, for example, making solar panels using sand and energy from solar panels is essentially capital energy. Problem is it’s too expensive and has storage issues. So the challenge is to overcome those issues through scale and innovation (I’m just using solar as an example, there are other forms). Right now when the US drops the price of the dollar, it just means more expensive oil, and oil is a bottleneck to growth in the suburban economy (every extra mile requires more oil to keep going because it requires driving, etc. But that suburban economy is how the US grows – both in terms of construction and asset prices/bubbles, etc…)
There is probably a transition energy regime with some forms of renewable capital energy and some legacy and a much higher dependence on nuclear (yes, I know, but nuclear power is less dangerous than global warming). That’s probably a 30 year economy as you transition to almost fully renewable with non-renewable as niche and not bottlenecked.
Mark Holbrook
Muito obrigado. Hey, nucular (sic) works for France. Please run for office.