Sunday, January 6, 2019

Week-end Wrap - January 5, 2019

Week-end Wrap - January 5, 2019
by Tony Wikrent
Economics Action Group, North Carolina Democratic Party Progressive Caucus

It’s Not Your Money
Ian Welsh, April 15, 2015
You also didn’t earn most of it. 
It seems like every time I discuss taxation, some libertarian will waltz in and say: “It’s my money and I don’t see why the government should be able to take it.” 
So let’s run through why, no, it isn’t your money. We’ll start with two numbers. The income per capita for the US in 2005 was $43,740. The income per capita for Bangladesh was $470. 

Now I want you to ask yourself the following question: Are Bangladeshis genetically inferior to Americans? Since not too many of my readers think white sheets look great at a lynching, I’ll assume everyone answered no. 
Right then, being American is worth $43,270 more than being Bangladeshi and it’s not due to Americans being superior human beings. If it isn’t because Americans are superior, then what is it? 
The answer is that if it isn’t individual, it must be social. On the individual but still social level, Americans are in fact smarter than Bangladeshis because as children they are far less likely to suffer from malnutrition. However not suffering from malnutrition when you’re a baby, toddler or young child has nothing to do with you and everything to do with the society you live in and your family–two things over which you have zero influence (perhaps you chose your mother, I didn’t!). 
Bangladeshis won’t, on average, get as good an education. They won’t get as much education either, since every child is needed to help earn a living as soon as possible. For most Bangladeshis, there’s no room for the extended childhood and adolescence to which westerners have grown accustomed, which often stretches into the late twenties or even early thirties, amongst those seeking Ph.Ds or becoming doctors or lawyers.
When a Bangladeshi grows up, the jobs available aren’t as good. If he or she starts a business, it will earn much less money than the equivalent American business. If he or she speculates in land and is very successful, the speculation will generate much less wealth than in America. 
One could go on and on. I trust the point is obvious—the vast majority of money that an American earns is due to being born an American. Certainly the qualities that make America a good place to live and a good place to make money are things that were created by Americans, but mostly they were created by Americans long dead or they are created by all Americans working together and are not located in the individual.
Max Sawicky lays out one of the best descriptions of neoliberalism
[The Populist Buzz (expired URL), via TEH SOCIALISMZ!!! AAAIIIEEE!!!! by Mike the Mad Biologist July 3, 2018, via Avedon's Sideshow 12-28-18]
While no Democratic politician would reject the slogan of universal coverage, the Clinton campaign offered no path to such an outcome. The Obama Administration went wobbly on one device to that end – the idea of a public option. Both leaders and their supporters can’t seem to grasp the inadequacy of market provision of health insurance, even as its deficiencies under ‘ObamaCare’ become ever more painfully evident.
More generally, ‘neoliberalism’ labors under the bias of seeking market solutions, up to and including creating them from scratch, as we saw with the Obama’s health insurance exchanges. The tendency is to discount the viability of public provision. 
I’m not suggesting that markets are never of use. I would say social-democracy is about pushing the balance in the direction of a myriad of needs unmet by “the market.” Neoliberalism is about searches for market-based approaches. 
The flap about “free college” offers another case in point. Critics of Sanders’ platform, including the most liberal, would wax philosophic in the vein of “nothing is free.” Of course, nobody thinks college instruction comes without costs. What is really at issue is whether the rising cost of college should be financed by taxes or by the ‘market’ route of students resorting to personal, eternal indebtedness… 
There is nothing much radical about free college. We have ‘free’ K-12 education and no plutocrats have been strung up. The practical difference between social-democratic and neoliberal is directional. Neoliberalism resists the enlargement of tax-financed public services… 
The accepted academic definition of neoliberalism traces back to the Nineteenth Century version of liberalism, which upheld free trade against mercantilism and supported no more than a very limited public sector. It’s said that this ideology enjoyed a revival in the Twentieth Century. From where I sit, among Republicans no revival was necessary. The ideology never went away. The bigger change was the movement away from the New Deal and the Great Society among Democrats, towards the view typified by Bill Clinton’s remark that “the era of big government is over.” 
…The struggle in the Democratic Party is between neo-liberalism and social-democracy (or “democratic socialism”).
Mike the Mad Biologist concluded:
....after decades of New Democrats, there is an ideological void in the Democratic Party. For those who are still angry at Senator Sanders for running against Clinton: you’re right, he shouldn’t have run. More accurately, he shouldn’t have had to run, because there should have been Democratic politicians who called for the positions he supported. But the only liberal Democratic option was a self-described 74 year-old socialist who really isn’t a Democratic Party member. After 25 years, give or take, of purging (even if it’s the polite purge of not hiring) liberal Democrats from positions of power, including entities like mainline think tanks, the only option left is the self-described socialists (who really don’t seem that socialist).
A More Diverse Oligarchy 
[Sardonicky, via Naked Capitalism 1-3-19]
The corporations that effectively own the place don't need to be taxed or prosecuted in order to alleviate wealth inequality and stop corruption.

They simply need to install a few more women and black and brown people at the top, and all will be status quo glorious for the oligarchy and continuously bad for the majority of people. Look at how well (until Russophobia, Inc. anyway) that's worked out for Facebook and its chief operating officer, billionaire Sheryl "Lean In" Sandberg. Having a woman in charge of the massive theft of personal data from users while she sells corporate feminism to minimum wage workers is just what the ruling class needs to pretend that we still have a democracy. 
With that bullshit in mind, Maxine Waters, the incoming Democratic chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee, vows to hold corporations' feet to the fire and force them to disclose how many women and black and brown people they have placed in their top executive positions. This will absolve the Democrats of not doing anything so drastic as investigating corporate malfeasance and rectifying our worsening wealth inequality....
The Democrats' pretense of meddling in private corporate affairs for the greater public good will then have the contrived salutory effect of Republicans accusing them of overreach and socialism. Regular people will take sides over which oligarchic cartel they'll be rooting for. Conservatives will accuse snowflake liberals of wanting too many safe spaces, and liberals will accuse conservatives of racism and misogyny. And it is so unfair, because all that the Democrats want is to make CEOs making about 300 times the salary of their average workers feel just a little bit "uncomfortable" before they lap up all that good press about their brave noble decisions to do the right diversionary diverse thing.

The only real winners will be the neoliberal corporatists, both within and without Congress. They'll be able to continue lecturing poor and dark-hued people that all they need to succeed, like their latest brown female corporate vice president, is to transform themselves into bootstrapping entrepreneurial strivers.
[Charlotte News & Observer, via Naked Capitalism 1-3-19]
“‘You can’t follow Jesus and not say something when you see injustice,’ Barber says. ‘We’re not allowed to stand down and retreat. The prophetic call demands that we say something..”
The neoliberal attack on poor people
gjohnsit [caucus99percent 1-5-19]
The two political parties are more alike than they are different, but there are differences. One of those differences is the Republican's outright demonization of the poor.... The terrible crime that conservatives get so outraged about is poor people getting free food. These [conservatives] are not people with Christian values, or even human values. These are people that need to be called out on their immorality.
Eric Levitz [New York Magazine, via DailyKos 1-5-19]
… French economist Thomas Piketty has demonstrated that high tax rates reduce pre-tax inequality – ostensibly, by discouraging rent-seeking among top executives, whose compensation is often determined less by productivity than a combination of social mores and their own audacity: CEOs are less likely to extract an extra $5 million from their companies (instead of allowing their firms to invest that sum in other purposes) if they know that Uncle Sam will collect 70 percent of their bonus. Thus, there is now some reason to believe that confiscatory top rates can reduce wage inequality, while producing some gains in economic efficiency. 
All of which is to say: In 1980, taxing incomes above $216,000 (or $658,213 in today’s dollars) at 70 percent was considered a moderate, mainstream idea, even though wage inequality was much less severe, and supply-side economics had yet to be discredited.
In 2016, this richest 0.9 percent earned about $1.7 trillion in taxable income and paid about $530 billion in taxes. These Americans would have to pay an additional $320 billion every year in taxes if the top tax rate went up to 70 percent, according to calculations based on IRS data....
The Congressional Budget Office also recently estimated that raising taxes on the two highest income brackets by 1 percentage point would net $123 billion over 10 years. That would be for everybody who earns more than $200,000 annually. 
The CBO also found that a 0.1 percent financial transactions tax on Wall Street would raise an additional $780 billion over 10 years, while returning the corporate tax rate to 35 percent would raise an additional $1 trillion over a decade. (The Republican tax law of 2017 lowered that rate from 35 percent to 21 percent.)
The Economics of Soaking the Rich: What does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez know about tax policy? A lot.
Paul Krugman [New York Times, via DailyKos 1-5-19]
Krugman quotes Peter Diamond,
Nobel laureate in economics and arguably the world’s leading expert on public finance (although Republicans blocked him from an appointment to the Federal Reserve Board with claims that he was unqualified. Really.)
and Emmanuel Saez and Christina Romer, former Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration, to wit:
To be more specific, Diamond, in work with Emmanuel Saez — one of our leading experts on inequality — estimated the optimal top tax rateto be 73 percent. Some put it higher: Christina Romer... estimates it at more than 80 percent.... 
What we see is that America used to have very high tax rates on the rich — higher even than those AOC is proposing — and did just fine. Since then tax rates have come way down, and if anything the economy has done less well. 
What this implies for economic policy is that we shouldn’t care what a policy does to the incomes of the very rich. A policy that makes the rich a bit poorer will affect only a handful of people, and will barely affect their life satisfaction, since they will still be able to buy whatever they want.

NAFTA at 25: A New Beginning? (Pt 1/2) (video interview) 
Lori Wallach [The Real News Network] (part 2/2), via Naked Capitalism 1-4-19]
“He’s trying out this USMCA rebrand. Well, that’s just not what it is. It’s NAFTA 2.0. It is not the transformational replacement of the corporate-rigged model of NAFTA, but it is in some ways improved relative to the original NAFTA. The biggest thing is the investor state dispute settlement regime under which corporations can sue governments in front of tribunals of three trade lawyers. The lawyers can order the governments to pay unlimited compensation of our taxpayer money for any claim that a corporation makes that their special rights and privileges under NAFTA have been undermined by a domestic environmental law, health regulation, court ruling. The three lawyers decisions are not appealable, and almost $400 million is paid out under that regime, and attacks the environmental health laws, tax expands, energy policies. So that outrageous system with the U.S. and Mexico has totally gotten rid of, and with respect to Mexico is largely walked back, that only a limited set of claims can be made, and only if a company has gone first to the domestic court systems, has spent–has basically gotten a final ruling from the highest court, or spent two and a half years trying to exhaust the domestic remedies. And then the big set of corporate rights claims aren’t allowed anymore. They can get money back if literally the government seizes their property through an expropriation and doesn’t pay them back. So that’s an improvement.”
As a Democrat, I am outraged and disgusted that the Democratic Party leadership was unwilling or unable to address the glaringly obvious injustice of investor state disputes, and left the issue as low lying fruit for Trump and the Republicans to pick.

Matt Peterson [The Atlantic, via Naked Capitalism 1-2-19]
“Lighthizer believes that the shrinking of the American steel industry isn’t a mere by-product of technological shifts, but the result of a war China has been waging for decades. He and his allies think the growing superpower will now take the fight to other U.S. interests, threatening the nation’s economic hegemony. Now he’s preparing his own battle plan, refined over a career of lobbying. He plans to bend the rules of the global economy in America’s favor—even if that means breaking the system America itself created.”
The value of Peterson's article is vitiated by his shallow understanding of economics. Twice he implies that the steel industry could not be that important because the industry's entire stock market capitalization was less than that of a single rising tech star (Apple, then Amazan). At another point, Peterson approvingly quotes a Senator in the 1990s rebuffing Lighthiser by declaring "you can't eat steel." My response to both the Senator and Peterson is that you can't eat food if you don't have steel with which to make agricultural implements and tractors. Steel is one of the basic products every industrial economy needs. Does it make sense to allow most of it to be produced oversees and imported? The obvious question is: How many American workers would be employed and at what wages if their jobs had been secured behind trade barriers of some sort? I would much rather have a thriving working class -- which we used to have before the rise of the free trade system described in this article by Peterson -- than entire generations lost to economic despair, with decreasing expected life spans (in other words, being killed off), while our stores are flooded with merchandise that is supposedly cheaper, but increasingly shoddy and crappified.

The Secret Behind Growth in Trump’s America Is Deficit Spending 
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 1-2-19]

Q and A with Avner Offer and Gabriel Söderberg (authors of The Nobel Factor: The Prize in Economics, Social Democracy, and the Market Turn). 
[Princeton University Press, via Naked Capitalism 1-2-19]
Why the Nobel Prize in economics usually goes to economists who prescribe disaster for society.
“Nobel prize-winners provide a high-quality sample of economics. The prize has a halo that makes economics credible to the wider public, for policies which are often inimical to the public interest. It arose out of the long conflict between the interests of the wealthy in stable prices, and of everyone else in social and material improvement. Between the wars, this conflict became focused in central banks, which became a brake on social democracy. After the Second World War, the Swedish Central Bank clashed repeatedly with the social democratic government over financing the welfare state, and extracted the prize as a concession. The prize was then captured by conservative Swedish economists, who used it to provide credibility for sustained resistance to social democracy. This story shows how ideas and arguments work through society and politics, and how the prestige of science has been mobilised for political ends.”

Wells Fargo agrees to $575 million settlement affecting all 50 states in wake of fake accounts
[USA Today, via Naked Capitalism 12-31-18] As Lambert Strteher notes: And no executives go to jail, despite outright theft from customers’ accounts.

[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture 12-30-18]

[Washington Post, via The Big Picture 1-3-19]

[The Guradian, via The Big Picture 1-2-19]

An Agenda for 2019 
Bernie Sanders [Reader Supported News, via Naked Capitalism 1-2-19]

The Anti-Trump Party: How The Democratic Party Has Lost Its Defining Values In The Obsession With Trump 
Jonathon Turley [via Naked Capitalism 1-2-19]

Trump supporter mercilessly mocked for posting an ‘attack’ on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that actually just made her look cool
[Alternet 1-31-9]
...a pro-Trump Twitter user by the name of Dan Jordan...tried to embarrass [AOC] by posting a clip of a young Ocasio-Cortez [in college]… dancing.... Meanwhile, some others pointed out the insane double standard Republicans were applying to Ocasio-Cortez’s lighthearted dance routine:

[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 1-3-19]


Medicare for All – How Can We Pay for It?
[Real News Network 12-30-18]
Prof. Robert Pollin and Michael Lighty discuss the findings of a new study by the Political Economy Research Institute at UMass Amherst. The study finds Medicare for All could reduce total healthcare spending by 10 percent, while creating stable access to good care and improving the health of all U.S. residents
Medicare for All is a Fight to Democratize the Economy
[Real News Network 12-31-18]
Kelly Coogan-Gehr of National Nurses United tells Paul Jay that healthcare represents one-fifth of the US economy, and to bring that fully into the public sector would be an important step towards transferring economic power to the public interest

The Corruption of the Republican Party
George Packer, December 14, 2018 [The Atlantic, via DownWithTyranny! 1-2-19]
There are legal remedies for Duncan Hunter, a representative from California, who will stand trial next year for using campaign funds to pay for family luxuries.* But there’s no obvious remedy for what the state legislatures of Wisconsin and Michigan, following the example of North Carolina in 2016, are now doing. 
Republican majorities are rushing to pass laws that strip away the legitimate powers of newly elected Democratic governors while defeated or outgoing Republican incumbents are still around to sign the bills. Even if the courts overturn some of these power grabs, as they have in North Carolina, Republicans will remain securely entrenched in the legislative majority through their own hyper-gerrymandering—in Wisconsin last month, 54 percent of the total votes cast for major-party candidates gave Democrats just 36 of 99 assembly seats—so they will go on passing laws to thwart election results. Nothing can stop these abuses short of an electoral landslide. In Wisconsin, a purple state, that means close to 60 percent of the total vote. 
The fact that no plausible election outcome can check the abuse of power is what makes political corruption so dangerous. It strikes at the heart of democracy. It destroys the compact between the people and the government. In rendering voters voiceless, it pushes everyone closer to the use of undemocratic means.... 
Taking away democratic rights—extreme gerrymandering; blocking an elected president from nominating a Supreme Court justice; selectively paring voting rolls and polling places; creating spurious anti-fraud commissions; misusing the census to undercount the opposition; calling lame-duck legislative sessions to pass laws against the will of the voters—is the Republican Party’s main political strategy, and will be for years to come.
Republicans have chosen contraction and authoritarianism because, unlike the Democrats, their party isn’t a coalition of interests in search of a majority. Its character is ideological. The Republican Party we know is a product of the modern conservative movement, and that movement is a series of insurgencies against the established order. Several of its intellectual founders—Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham, among others—were shaped early on by Communist ideology and practice, and their Manichean thinking, their conviction that the salvation of Western civilization depended on the devoted work of a small group of illuminati, marked the movement at its birth....

The party purged itself of most remaining moderates, growing ever-more shallow as it grew ever-more conservative... Jeff Flake, the outgoing senator from Arizona (whose conservative views come with a democratic temperament), describes this deterioration as “a race to the bottom to see who can be meaner and madder and crazier. It is not enough to be conservative anymore. You have to be vicious.” The viciousness doesn’t necessarily reside in the individual souls of Republican leaders. It flows from the party’s politics, which seeks to delegitimize opponents and institutions, purify the ranks through purges and coups, and agitate followers with visions of apocalypse—all in the name of an ideological cause that every year loses integrity as it becomes indistinguishable from power itself....

The corruption of the Republican Party in the Trump era seemed to set in with breathtaking speed. In fact, it took more than a half century to reach the point where faced with a choice between democracy and power, the party chose the latter. Its leaders don’t see a dilemma—democratic principles turn out to be disposable tools, sometimes useful, sometimes inconvenient. The higher cause is conservatism, but the highest is power. After Wisconsin Democrats swept statewide offices last month, Robin Vos, speaker of the assembly, explained why Republicans would have to get rid of the old rules: “We are going to have a very liberal governor who is going to enact policies that are in direct contrast to what many of us believe in.”
Metacognitive Failure as a Feature of Those Holding Radical Beliefs
[ScienceDirect, via The Big Picture 1-3-19]

Following Trump ‘off a cliff’: Psychological analysis reveals 14 key traits that explain the president’s die-hard supporters
[Raw Story, via The Big Picture 12-30-18]

Democrats attempting to club progressives into submission again
[caucus99percent 1-4-19]
Unfortunately, Pelosi, Schumer and Hoyer are doing everything in their power to keep the progressive insurgency in check, and keep their neoliberal/corporate money machine in power. Beyond the many moral and ethical problems with this, it’s just plain stupid politics. About the only way Democrats could lose their 2018 momentum in 2020 is to return to the same old neoliberal, corporate-friendly policies that lost them the election in 2016.
They’re being supported by most of the mainstream media, many of the pundits who’ve been the architects of the Democratic Party’s precipitous decline over the last few decades, and a robust and well-funded neoliberal infrastructure composed of not-for-profits, many unions, foundations, and public interest groups, who’ve gone into overdrive on their anti-Bernie campaign. It was this neoliberal mafia that helped deliver the nomination to Hillary Clinton in 2016, which in turn depressed turnout to the point that Trump was able to win the election with just over 26 percent of eligible voters.

Axelrod: Why Warren will be such a major player in 2020 
David Axelrod [CNN, via Naked Capitalism 1-2-19]  
“I served in the White House when Warren, then a special House counsel, was pummeling treasury officials over treatment of Wall Street executives who were culpable in the financial crisis. I saw her inaugurate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the government watchdog that saved billions for consumers before the Trump administration relegated it to the sidelines. She has offered a series of serious ideas about government and Wall Street reform, and is one of the most incisive members of the Senate. Warren also has laid the groundwork for her candidacy more assiduously than most, running an extensive, sophisticated operation in 2018 to help Democratic candidates around the country, even as she ran for re-election to the Senate.”

 Return of the Neocons 
Stephen Wertheim [New York Review of Books, via Naked Capitalism 1-4-19] 
“In Washington, D.C., liberal foreign policy hands have reacted to Trump’s presidency less by reaching out to ordinary citizens than by crossing K Street to make common cause with their neighborhood neocons. Among other efforts, the Center for American Progress (CAP), the leading Clintonian policy shop, is now issuing joint reports with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the leading neocon incubator, which this year sent John Bolton to be National Security Adviser. CAP donated $200,000 to AEI in 2017.”
The Center for American Progress has rapidly become the poster child for exactly what's wrong with the Democratic Party establishment. With leadership like this, who needs enemies?

Private Equity Controls the Gatekeepers of American Democracy 
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 1-2-19]  
“Devices made by Election Systems & Software LLC, Dominion Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic Inc. will process about nine of every ten ballots next week. Each of the companies is privately held and at least partially controlled by private equity firms.”
Behind the epidemic of police killings in America: Class, poverty and race 
[World Socialist Web Site] (parts two and three). 
“This study reviews all the data available on police shootings for the year 2017, and analyzes it based on geography, income, and poverty levels, as well as race. It identifies a major omission in all the published accounts: the vast and rising death toll among working-class white men in rural and small-town America, who are being killed by police at rates that approach those of black men in urban areas. Police violence is focused overwhelmingly on men lowest on the socio-economic ladder: in rural areas outside the South, predominately white men; in the Southwest, disproportionately Hispanic men; in mid-size and major cities, disproportionately black men. Significantly, in the rural South, where the population is racially mixed, white men and black men are killed by police at nearly identical rates. What unites these victims of police violence is not their race, but their class status (as well as, of course, their gender).”

Rise of carbon dioxide–absorbing mountains in tropics may set thermostat for global climate
[Science, via Naked Capitalism 1-1-19] 

[Casper Star-Tribune, via Naked Capitalism 1-2-19]

U.S. cities committed to running on 100% renewable power can be models for a national plan
by Meteor Blades [DailyKos 12-29-18]
From Abita Springs, Louisiana, population 2,365, to San Diego, California, population 1.3 million, U.S. cities are joining others around the world in pledging to obtain 100 percent of their electricity from renewable (or at least non-carbon) sources. As of December 17, those are just two of the 102 U.S. cities that have made such a formal commitment. The mayors of those 102 cities and 104 others now stand with the 100 percent pledge, though more than half of them have yet to convince their governing bodies to follow their lead in the matter. Nineteen months ago, only 25 cities had made the commitment. In addition to these cities, 11 counties, Hawai’i and California are shooting for the 100 percent goal. 
Six U.S. cities have already fulfilled their pledge: Aspen, CO; Burlington, VT; Georgetown, MD; Greensburg, KS; Rock Port, MO; and Kodiak Island, AK, run on 100 percent renewables now.

Outside the United States, 80 cities in the UK, and 23 other cities worldwide are committed to reaching 100 percent renewables in the next decade or two. At least 100 cities already get at least 70 percent of their power from renewable sources. These include Auckland, New Zealand; Nairobi, Kenya; and Oslo, Norway.
Report: Renewables could provide majority of power in Texas
Houston Chronicle [via American Wind Energy Association 1-2-19]
Texas has access to enough sun and wind energy that the two energy sources could meet most of the state's energy needs around the clock without a significant amount of battery storage, according to Rice University. "There is nowhere else in the world better positioned to operate without coal than Texas is," says associate professor Dan Cohan.
Deep underground, new NYC train hub slowly takes shape 
[Japan Times, via Naked Capitalism 1-2-19]  
On a recent morning, MTA officials led a walking and stair-climbing tour to showcase progress on the unfinished, cavern-like terminal with ceilings as high as six stories. Dozens of high-speed escalators are being built to lead down to a 350,000-square-foot (32,500-square-meter) LIRR concourse with marble already laid on its walls and space reserved for retail shops and dining areas. It will be the hub for 8 miles (13 kilometers) of new tunnels blasted and drilled out from 400-million-year-old bedrock, winding their way under Park Avenue and the East River and on to Queens and Long Island.
Chinese cities open urban rail lines
[Railway Age 1-4-19]
In Beijing, metro Line 6 was extended by 10.6km from Haidian Wuluju to Jin’anqiao on December 30. Jin’anqiao is an interchange with S1, the 9km elevated maglev line to Shichang, which opened on December 30, 2017.
China plans 6,800 km of new rail track in 2019 amid infrastructure push 
[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 1-2-19]  

China opens six new lines
[Railway Age 1-2-19]
China added 866km to its high-speed network on December 25/26 with the opening of three new lines, bringing the country a step closer to completing its ambitious ‘Four Vertical and Four Horizontal’ high-speed system.


New Taipei light rail line opens
[Railway Age 1-2-19]
Trial passenger operation began on the first phase of the Danhai light rail network in New Taipei on December 24 with a month of free rides on the 7.3km Green Mountain Line. The 11-station line connects Hongshulin station on the Taipei Metro Red Line with Danhai New Township.

New Japan train to test limits of high-speed rolling stock
[Railway Age 1-2-19]
Japan carrier launches Alfa-X (E956), its 400km/h Shinkansen test train which will be used to evaluate new technical and aerodynamic advances for the next generation of Japanese high-speed trains.



India opens Brahmaputra road-rail bridge
[Railway Age 1-2-19]
India Prime Minister Narendra Modi on December 25 officially opened the 4.94km Bogibeel road-rail bridge which crosses the Brahmaputra river and plugs a gap in the Northeast Frontier Railway network in Assam between Dibrugarh with Dhemaji.

China becomes first nation to land on the Moon’s far side
[Nature, via Naked Capitalism 1-4-19]  
“Chang’e-4 reportedly landed inside the Von Kármán Crater at 2:26 UT on 3 January, and has sent back its first images. At 14:22 UT the mission’s 140-kilogram Yutu2 rover drove down a ramp and onto the lunar terrain, according to images widely circulated on social media. As the Moon’s far side is permanently hidden from Earth, the news of Chang’e-4’s successful landing was relayed by a spacecraft called Queqiao. It has been circling around a gravitationally stable point about 60,000 kilometres beyond the Moon since it launched in May.”
New Horizons Spacecraft Makes New Year’s Day Flyby of Ultima Thule, the Farthest Rendezvous Ever 
[Space.com, via Naked Capitalism 1-2-19]

It’s the End of the Gene As We Know It 
[Nautilus, via Naked Capitalism 1-4-19]   
“Scientists now understand that the information in the DNA code can only serve as a template for a protein. It cannot possibly serve as instructions for the more complex task of putting the proteins together into a fully functioning being, no more than the characters on a typewriter can produce a story…. Eggs and sperm contain a vast variety of factors: enzymes and other proteins; amino acids; vitamins, minerals; fats; RNAs (nucleic acids other than DNA); hundreds of cell signalling factors; and other products of the parents’ genes, other than genes themselves. Molecular biologists have been describing how those factors form networks of complex interactions. Together, they self-organize according to changing conditions around them. Being sensitive to statistical patterns in the changes, they anticipate future states, often creating novel, emergent properties to meet them.”
Will the world embrace Plan S, the radical proposal to mandate open access to science papers? [Nature, via Naked Capitalism 1-4-19] 
“How far will Plan S spread? Since the September 2018 launch of the Europe-backed program to mandate immediate open access (OA) to scientific literature, 16 funders in 13 countries have signed on. That’s still far shy of Plan S’s ambition: to convince the world’s major research funders to require immediate OA to all published papers stemming from their grants. In December 2018, China stunned many by expressing strong support for Plan S. This month, a national funding agency in Africa is expected to join, possibly followed by a second U.S. funder. Others around the world are considering whether to sign on. Plan S, scheduled to take effect on 1 January 2020, has drawn support from many scientists, who welcome a shake-up of a publishing system that can generate large profits while keeping taxpayer-funded research results behind paywalls. But publishers (including AAAS, which publishes Science) are concerned, and some scientists worry that Plan S could restrict their choices. If Plan S fails to grow, it could remain a divisive mandate that applies to only a small percentage of the world’s scientific papers. To transform publishing, the plan needs global buy-in. The more funders join, the more articles will be published in OA journals that comply with its requirements.”
I have had one paper published in a social science journal, and found the economics of the endeavor are ludicrous. Authors get nothing, not even a free copy of the journal. To buy a hard copy of the journal my article was published in, Taylor & Francis wanted nearly $100. There has to be a better way. My understanding is that  Elsevier has the same business model. I suppose the first step is to gather all the highly paid CEOs and executives on a cruise ship, and send them off on a voyage to discuss alternatives to their current business model. The second step: sink the ship. This is clearly an area of economic activity that is simply dysfunctional under the profit motive. The dissemination of new scientific knowledge is among the most important activities of any society, and should have clear priority over profit.

Facial Recognition Software Improves by a Factor of 20 Since 2014
[Machine Design Today 1-3-19]

Carbon Fiber Composites Increasing As Recycling Candidates In Aftermarket
[Aviation Week and Space Technology 1-3-19]
Of all structural elements on aircraft, carbon fiber has been the most arduous to recycle. Protacio says the past 15 years had not yielded a viable solution for recycling carbon fiber back into manufacturing. But UAM has now used a recycling technique based on chemolysis, which decomposes substances into simpler elements using chemical agents. “However, it is the preparation and harvesting of the carbon fiber from actual aircraft components that differentiates UAM’s recycling efforts from those that recycle carbon fiber from manufacturing sites.” 
Protacio says, ELG’s process to recycle excess composites from manufacturing will improve aviation’s impact on carbon fiber supplies. She notes that carbon fiber is increasing dramatically in aircraft production, with modern aircraft now made of approximately 50% composites, versus 1970s models manufactured with less than 1% carbon-based materials. 
Newly Developed Metamaterials Change Mechanical Properties Under Magnetic Fields
Stephen Mraz, December 26, 2018 [Machine Design Today]
A team of researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has created a new class of metamaterials that can be put inside 3D printed structures and nearly instantly (less than a second) respond and stiffen when exposed to a magnetic field—a development that could be applied to next-generation protective gear and a host of other innovations. 
The so-called “field-responsive mechanical metamaterials” (FRMMs) use a viscous, magnetically responsive fluid that is manually injected into the hollow struts and beams of 3D-printed lattices. Unlike other shape-morphing—or “4D-printed”—materials (the fourth dimension being time), the overall structure of the FRMMs does not change. The fluid’s ferromagnetic particles inside the part form chains in response to the magnetic field and stiffens the fluid and the lattice structure as a result.
Real-Time Control, Safety, and Security: Technological Innovation in the Factory of Tomorrow
Brendan O'Dowd, December 14, 2018 [Machine Design Today]
The proliferation of sensors throughout factories and process plants is generating vast flows of real-time data. Legacy communication protocols between sensor nodes and PLCs, such as 4 mA to 20 mA control loops, are giving way to ultra-fast industrial variants of the Ethernet protocol, enabling increasing integration of operational technology (OT) infrastructure in the factory with information technology (IT) in the enterprise. 
In responding to this new demand for high-speed data transfer in the factory, OEMs need to future-proof their system implementations. This must be done not only to support not industrial Ethernet protocols in use today, but also the emerging time-sensitive networking (TSN) variant of Ethernet, which is likely to become the standard wired networking technology for real- time industrial communications.





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