JD Tuccille, Reason, May 12, 2025.
excerpt:
Putting major opposition parties under the designation of “extremists” will be subject to surveillance. This is a horrifying step towards democracy.
“One of the things I appreciate about America is that when the federal government attacks free speech, it is instantly pushed back into civil society,” replies Jacob Muchangama, future director of free speech at Vanderbilt University, responds to the controversy. “People take us on the streets. In Europe, freedom of speech has declined sharply for years, but there is no real protest or mainstream concern adjacent to the democratic Bucks Landing. In fact, the Old World is in a state of delusional “censorship denial.”
This was not an isolated incident. Last month, AFD-related editor David Bendels was sentenced to seven months on probation after posting an ock-lol meme from former German Home Minister Nancy Faeser, who holds a sign that German has been changed to digital.
Nicholas Bloom, Kyle Handley, André Kurmann, and Philip A. Luck, Research Briefing in Economic Policy, No. 431, Cato Institute, April 30, 2025.
excerpt:
Our study investigates the extent to which conflicting trends in manufacturing and service employment growth are associated. Our findings reveal that the local labor market, exposed to China’s import competition, experienced greater manufacturing unemployment. Butse’s losses were offset by growth in employment for stronger services. This mainly stemmed from reassignment of duties within the company. Importantly, this reassignment expansion was varied across regions. Services jobs outweigh manufacturing unemployment in places with a large share of university-educated workers, including a successful transition in most of the West Coast and large cities. A place with a low global share of university education and a high manufacturing dependency, including most of the Midwest and only limited service growth in Southern education.
Our findings mean that China’s shock was the online, job creator, not Job Killer. At the same time, by transferring jobs from industrial centres to coasts and metropolitan cities, Shock produced not only the entire region, but also winners and losers, thereby contributing to the changing geography of employment in the United States. This experience provides an important leson regarding the discussion of tariffs. Trade barriers may revive Japanese manufacturing jobs, but not only will they raise prices, they may also rise in specially high-edited and highly productive regions. In other words, the aggressive tariff policy proposed by the White House may generate some winners, but will likely lose the entire United States.
Timothy Taylor, Conversational Economist, May 13, 2025.
excerpt:
The team at McKinsey Global Institute writes about mushrooms in The Power of One: How Outstanding Companies Increase National Productivity (May 6, 2025). As these were integrated in the subtitle, “National productivity growth is the issue of a small number of companies that take bold strategic action rather than improving efficiently by millions of companies.” In the relatively short time frame analysed in this study from 2011 to 2019, this SEM could be true.
The author has a dataset of 8,300 companies across the US, UK and Germany economies, all with at least 50 employees and over 500 employees, focusing on four sectors: retail, automotive, aerospace, travel and logistics, computers and electronics. They call this limited group of companies in each country the “lab economy.” A “outstanding” company defines it as a company in which the increased productivity of its single company itself adds at least 0.01% to the productivity growth of the entire set of companies in a single country’s laboratory economy. Conversation, they define a “Struggler” company as a single company, and in itself subtracts at least 0.01% of productivity growth from the entire economy. Within the course, most companies are in extremes.
and:
First, a relatively small number of outstanding standouts and struggling gyaa can promote the overall growth patterns of the economy’s productivity. The report states that “less than 100 companies in the 8,300-A group sample, which was called “around two-thirds of the productivity of approximately two-thirds of each sample of each of the three countries analyzed.”
Second, the US has made outstanding outstandings a higher proport compared to the Straggyrs combined with Britain and Germany.
Third, US standouts are likely to grow and export, with US Stragers more likely to contract compared to the UK and Germany.
First, a relatively small number of outstanding standouts and struggling gyaa can promote the overall growth patterns of the economy’s productivity. The report states that “less than 100 companies in the 8,300-A group sample, which was called “around two-thirds of the productivity of approximately two-thirds of each sample of each of the three countries analyzed.”
Marc Oestreich, Reason, May 13, 2025.
excerpt:
When a power plant travels through the office or requests emergency spikes, the power grid does not have cushions. You need to answer immediately. That’s where inertia comes into play. In coal, gas and nuclear power plants, giant turbine rotors rotate at thousands of RPM. Even if the power is reduced, they will continue to rotate, slow the frequency shift, and release the stored energy to buy price times (from seconds to 1 minute, the backup kicks in). It’s not the power of backup, it’s the breathing chamber. Like the Peloton flywheel, it stabilizes things even with input failures.
If the frequency drops too much after 11 times, automatic protection will begin. The plant shuts down. Isolate the substation. The grid grabs its own limbs to survive. If the imbalance is able to respond faster than the recovery, then the collapse is a cascade. The entire area will be darker – not due to lack of strength, but due to lack of time. Even the correct answer is a little late, and there is no answer at all.
That’s what happened in Spain. On April 28th, solar energy was generating 18 gigawatts of electricity. This is more than half of national demand. Within an hour, more than two-thirds of that had disappeared as authorities were left behind in “technical fluctuations.” The grid frequency has plummeted. France tried to send emergency power to the whole of Intetie, but the imbalance grabbed the connection. In five seconds, the entire Iberian grid collapsed.
Experts/government regulators are not sure if solar alone caused the failure. But the system that succumbed to hell to pushing renewables was devastating to ensure it had repeated failures. This was luck. It was a bad policy made into a manifesto – for the sequence, I eat to call the four horses of the grid fault:
