Dana Blankenhorn

This Will Get Me in Trouble

Asked what his members wanted the answer of union legend Samuel Gompers was simple. “More.” 

Despite being encouraged by liberal interests, unions are the most conservative institutions society has. They advanced most during the 1930s, when manufacturers sought to control input costs and keep production going. Remember, too, that the Great Depression was caused by deflation. Labor assured limited inflation.

While Cloud Czars like Google and Amazon create deflation, they also fight unions because unions limit the flexibility they see as essential to their mission, fostering rapid change.

Some act surprised that Amazon is fighting this battle in Alabama. Bessemer is next to Birmingham, the state’s industrial heart. Birmingham was first called the “Magic City” because the steel mills there seemed to spring up by magic. It’s not an antebellum town. It was, for many years, a union town.

China

President Biden is right.

China is not our enemy, but it does represent “extreme competition.” 

The difference between the two is simple. If they’re our enemy, then only one side can win. If we’re in competition, both sides can.

This is not a popular view. It’s popular to hate China. We hate China because of the Uigyurs. We hate it because of Hong Kong. We hate it because of the South China Sea, and the way it threatens Taiwan. Some say the country is accreting territory from neighbors like India and Mongolia.

But China’s autocratic ways can be used against it, assuming we maintain America and the West as reasonable, attractive alternatives. That means welcoming Chinese immigrants and their money. Tyranny also hurts creativity.

But there’s one area where China is smarter than we are. That involves its Cloud Emperors.

The Big Political Story of 2021

Money is walking away from the GOP. (Shown, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos.)

This has been going on for some time. Silicon Valley, Seattle, Boston and New York, the places where money is made, generally vote for Democrats. They do this because Democrats deliver what technology wants. Tech runs on brains. It’s always in the market for more of them. Brains need training, they need to be empowered, they want to be recruited, they like to be comfortable.

This is the big economic change of our time, a move from resources to brains as the gating factor to growth. Resources need force to secure them. Manufacturing needs hands to run machines. Tech needs brains.

The news hasn’t gotten to everyone. Wall Street sharpies think they know more than the market. There are tech executives who want to corner the market on brains and think other brains are a threat.

These views are wrong for the economy.

Still. It’s hard for money to switch sides. The Republican Party is the natural home of money. That’s been true since the 1860s. For generations, however, money sided with progress. Progress is the root of the word progressive. Both Roosevelts ran as progressives. They wanted progress. So did most businesspeople.

Murdoch Seeks Takeover of Australia’s Online Market

To some reporters, Australia’s demand that Google and Facebook “pay” for links to local papers seems like a revolution.

It’s not. It’s embezzlement. The embezzler isn’t even the Australian government. They only work for the embezzler.

The embezzler is Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch’s News Corp. has 52% of Australia’s news market, and more than 20% of the electronic news marketplace. The Murdoch press there is, if anything, even more propagandistic than it is here. That’s why Australia has the worst climate policy of any nation in the world.

That’s the “hero” that’s going to “spank big tech” and “save the news business.”

The Big Tech Conspiracy That Wasn’t

Once you show you like something, I offer you more of it.

Is this a conspiracy?

Not unless I’m a scaled Web site. Because this is at the heart of the charge against “Big Tech,” the companies I call Cloud Czars.

• Show a preference for certain videos on YouTube and YouTube offers you more videos like them.
• “Like” things on Facebook or Instagram, and you will get more things like them.
• Follow certain celebrities on Twitter, you’re offered more like them.
• The same with Amazon Kindle books. When you buy something from Amazon, you’ll be followed for days by ads offering the same thing.

The algorithms follow human nature. Chances are that if you like a book about 12^th century monks who solve murders, you might like another one. If you like Henry Winkler, you’ll probably like Ron Howard.

The problem is that if you like crazy conspiracy theories on Instagram, or videos describing the terrors of the Illuminati on YouTube, you’ll get more of them. Like those, you’ll get more. And more and more.

The Common Good

Without an overwhelming victory for democracy on November 3, I’ll be glad to die.

Trump is the ultimate expression of a basic misperception, that private goods matter more than the public goods, that national well-being matters more than global well-being, that fences and borders can isolate and separate us.

This is especially true when it comes to the environment.

My children face a bleak future unless current climate trends are reversed. But the U.S. can’t change it alone. Every country must do its part.

The ice caps’ disappearance means many cities around the world are doomed. New Orleans is doomed. Miami is doomed. New York City is doomed. So are Calcutta, Mumbai, Shanghai, and Kuala Lumpur. Sea level rise means these places will soon be underwater.

Meanwhile, the methane of the Siberian tundra is bubbling to the surface. Fires in the Amazon and West mean the Earth can no longer breathe. The “habitable” part of the U.S. will be cut by two-thirds within 50 years. The oceans are warming so that, along with overfishing, all that’s left will be jellyfish.

In past bouts of global warming, when the ice caps disappeared, nature adjusted. Cooling trends returned and nature came back. With man-made global warming, there’s no natural reversal. It takes 80 grams of energy to melt a gram of ice. Once the ice is melted, 80 grams of energy take its temperature to 112.

Defending Facebook

Let’s start with something that should seem obvious.

Facebook is no longer a social network. It’s the global telecommunications company.

It became this by offering free services on a global scale. This came about thanks to its investment in cloud, beginning early in the last decade. While AT&T sat on its assets, along with all the companies once known as PTTs (Postal, Telegraph and Telephone services), Facebook put $1 billion/quarter and up into a network of cloud data centers.

Facebook did it the same way Amazon did, with cash flow. It made its services free, like Google.

Moore’s Third Law of Management

What other analysts call “big tech” I refer to as “Cloud Czars.”

I do it for a reason.

What distinguishes Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Facebook isn’t their managements’ “ruthlessness.” It’s their heavy investment, over many years, in cloud computing centers.

Even early in the 2010s, it took $1 billion of capital each quarter to get into the cloud market. That has only increased with time. Now it averages $4 billion each quarter.

The money must come from somewhere. Cloud is a capital-intensive business. If you’re handing out dividends, it’s because you don’t know what else to do with the shareholders’ cash.

Blessings of the Pandemic

The economy has tanked.

We are all in our homes, scared out of our minds.

But there are blessings amid the ruins.

The air is cleaner. The water is cleaner. It is quieter. Animals have come out of hiding around the world. People have re-learned the value of family. Science matters again. Community matters again.

There were pictures posted, early in April, of Venice with water you could see through, of LA without smog. Those were retouched. Things aren’t that good.

Still, they’re immeasurably better than they were.

The climate crisis doesn’t have to destroy that progress. Unless we have a death wish.

The Virus

The Coronavirus is Donald Trump’s Iran Hostage Crisis.

Just as I said the week he was elected, Trump is the Bizarro Carter. 

Analysts who think we’re too dumb to open a history book keep harping on how Trump reverses every Obama action. But the contrasts with Carter ring even more true, because they’re so stark, and make the future so clear.

Carter was the last exemplar of what I called the FDR Theory of Unity. It was something he used to fight the Depression and World War II. Democrats kept running on it for the next generation.

Trump is the ultimate expression of the Nixon Thesis of Conflict. There was the friendly side in politics, and there were the enemies. Over time Republicans, to maintain internal unity, defined more-and-more people as enemies. Today it’s anyone who defies Trump, by word or deed, in even the smallest way. He acts like the Sun God, but he’s more like the later Mao Zedong, the one who spawned the Cultural Revolution.

The Nixon Thesis killed a lot of people. It was used to justify a generation’s wars for oil, transforming the Cradle of Civilization into a charnel house. This is fine with Trumpublicans, who don’t see pain felt by others as meaningful.

But as Mel Brooks said, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall in a sewer and die.” A lot of Trumpublicans are about to cut their fingers, and worse, on the altar of Trump’s stupidity.

Say what you will about how China handled the virus. They got it under control. Once they became convinced of the reality, they took extreme measures, poured in immense resources, and within a month the number of cases was dropping.