On the ketchup thing, ketchup was originally (in the 17th century) a fermented fish sauce. In the 18th century the primary ingredient in ketchup was mushrooms. Tomato ketchup is relatively new, appearing in the 19th century.
The very history of tomato ketchup disproves the idea that people don't like change; the truth is people vary by the degree to which they seek out and enjoy novel experiences. But I think there's a kind of uncanny valley effect when something isn't quite different enough to seem new; rather it seems "not right". It'd be easier to get someone to like mushroom ketchup, which is brown, than tomato ketchup which was colored brown.
Corporate raiders do not raid startups. They raid established firms with assets that can offset debts.
Startups are a totally different case. First of all, they are more likely to fail than to succeed, and the reason they fail is they run out of cash to pay current obligations. Now when that starts to happen, and they can't raise more cash, so they go to the creditor for more favorable terms, and that's one place where a creditor can deal himself in in various ways because he's got you by the short hairs.
Actually, giving workers a million dollars wouldn't make them happier. Studies show that the marginal hedonic value of income is essentially zero once you get to a certain point (about $70K/year). Studies of lottery winners show that a year after winning they are on average only slightly happier than before winning; and I'd bet if you confined the study to people who had more than $70,000 of income the hedonic value of winning would be zero.
It's a shame that money has such little hedonic value, because research shows that improving employee mood improves productivity. If money were all that mattered, HR would be reduced to a number on a spreadsheet: the optimal amount of money to pay any given employee.
It should come as no shock that employee mood has an effect on productivity, but the bad news is that most of an individual's equilibrium point for happiness is genetic. It's important to hire positive people because managing someone who is a pill is a never-ending exercise in spitting into the wind.
The single evidence-based happiness factor that employers have the greatest input into is the strength of an employee's social connections. This isn't just about giving an employee time and encouragement to pursue family and friendships; it's about fostering a positive atmosphere at work. The things is, it's hard.
Well, if four days is a bad idea, why not a six day week? What makes five days the perfect amount of time to work for all jobs?
The answer is that there is no optimal number that's right for all jobs. If you're a dairy farmer the cows have to be milked seven days a week. If you're a paper pusher, that next piece of paper can usually wait longer than a cow.
My own observations of desk workers is that the longer they spend at the desk, the larger proportion of time they spend at non-productive tasks. I've known people who habitually put in sixty hours a week who never are working very hard. Is the long week the cause of low work intensity, or vice versa? I'd say both: it's a vicious circle.
If you made no other changes, reducing a desk worker's week from five days to four would make him less productive, but probably not 20% less productive. But an intelligent plan wouldn't leave things to chance; you'd set a pace of work that is sustainable for four days but not for five. You'd disallow a lot of time-wasting activities that are tolerated now because the work week has plenty of hours in it.
Would that work for every job? Of course not. But there's no reason to think that five eight hour days is optimal for every job or person either.
First of all, this is credit, not investment. It's a different game, because if things go belly up as creditor you're at the head of the line to be repaid; as an owner you're at the tail. I've seen deals where creditors moved in, took over IP and other assets put up as collateral, and started up successful companies without the debt burden the technology's creators were operating under. Unless the other investors or owners can come up with a huge bag of cash immediately, they end up with nothing.
If you've got deep enough pockets, being the largest creditor could be a better way to obtain the fruits of a startup's labor than buying an ownership position.
Also, even if this were taking an ownership stake in the company, China as a nation with 1/5 of a world's population is in a different position than an individual investor, who should be focused on future profits. China is playing a minimax strategy where the payoff is national power, not money. An individual who invests out of fears of "missing out" is being irrational; a nation may be choosing to hedge its bets in a very different game. And as a sovereign state China can simply do things that would be illegal for an individual, so the rules of the game it's playing look very different.
Maybe the phone vendor has a different vision for what an app store should contain.
Now granted, this is a common type of excuse for making life difficult for customers who want to switch vendors, but there are legitimate reasons for doing something like that, like catering to customers with special security concerns. Or maybe you'd want to offer an app store that only had open source apps.
This is where context matters. How much choice does the consumer have? Since Android has about 85% of the smartphone market, and apple about 15%, the answer is not much.
The point of standard of identity regulations is so that consumers aren't fooled into buying one thing when they think they are buying another. It's consumer-friendly regulation. It prevents companies from selling margarine as "butter".
But "soy milk", "almond milk" and "coconut milk" are the proper English names for those things; everybody knows they don't come out of a cow -- in fact that's the whole point of those products. So why is the administration looking at this question?
It's the kind of regulatory position that's "business friendly" to friendly businesses. While big agribusiness donated more to Clinton (because they wanted TPP), dairy and meat backed Trump. You can see the Trump adminstration cares about dairy; we're probably going to have a trade war with Canada over milk.
Paper ballots with machine tallying combines the most of the best features of both systems and is cheap, logistically simple, and auditable. It also scales with license or technical limitations. I live in a state which uses that system and if turnout is heavy at the polling place they just set up another row of cheap pop-up voting booths, doubling the polling place's throughput for less than a price of a single voting machine.
Of course one man's bug is sometimes another man's feature.
I'm convinced that the reason these machines are so popular despite their cost, insecurity, and logistical burden is that they enable political parties to manipulate election results, not by hacking, but simply using the bottleneck they represent to generate long lines in precincts unfavorable to them.
You are talking about software engineering approaches to securing the system. Those are important, but the overall system design has to be secure, otherwise it doesn't matter how secure the operating system is.
A better approach would be to have the system print out human readable, machine readable paper ballots, which the voter carries from the voting booth to a secure ballot box. This wouldn't prevent the machine from mismarking ballots, but there would be a high probability of someone detecting an effort large enough to swing an election.
You are absolutely correct that from a market standpoint there is no such thing as a shortage or a surplus, provided you make certain simplifying assumptions, namely (1) that if the price rises the quantities supplied can rise (in effect) instantaneously and (2) there are no externalities -- costs that are borne by people who aren't a party to the transaction.
Some commodities like gold can increase in supply relatively quickly as prices go up. There are marginal gold mines that start up and shut down as gold prices fluctuate because the concentration of gold in their ore is on the lower end of what is economic to recover.
At the other end of hte spectrum, consider brain surgery. If we suddenly discovered a lot more people needed brain surgery than previously believed, the pay for brain surgeons would go up, but the supply of brain surgeons would take years to change. During those years you would have a shortage.
Externalities can also cause markets to undersupply. Lets assume the number of pilots is too low for our "national security needs", whatever they are. This is not a problem for the airlines, nor the pilots; those national security needs are external to the transaction between them. So a shortage can exist, because it is not a shortage from the point of view of the airlines. It's not their problem, but that doesn't mean it's nobody's problem.
Well, it was a rhetorical question with a rather obvious answer. The real interesting question is why people in places like Russia put up with it? That's a very important thing for Americans to be thinking about.
Here's something to chew on, though. Norway ranks #1 in the world for press freedom; Russia ranks #148. This is good proxy for overall political freedom and the degree to which the people control the government, and vice versa.
Well, you're implicitly assuming there is one kind of politics which employs identity and another kind that doesn't. I don't think so. All politics is "identity politics", the only difference is whether an identity sees itself as marginalized or in a dominant position.
The dissatisfaction you have with people's "identity politics" is just the dissatisfaction everyone has with people who have different agenda from them. No matter who you are, people who are different from you demanding concessions.
Moving energy by powerline is no way cheaper than moving petro to your gas station....
Tesla's charging stations are all getting solar, with the goal of removing them from the grid entirely. You could do the same thing.
Grid losses are dependent upon the state where you live; they run from 2.2% to around 13%, with the nationwide average being around 10% losses. However, once the energy is in your electric car, you lose a further 40% of it before it drives the wheels; for gasoline engines the further losses are 80% (source: Trump Administration).
So even if you live in the worst case state for electricity transmission losses, and the gasoline you use magically appears at the pump with no energy inputs for refining and transport, you're still losing more net energy with your gasoline car than with your electric vehicle.
People in the US are conditioned to think in black and white. Americans even use the same word -- "socialism" -- to refer to Maoist China and the contemporary Scandinavian countries. In fact, that confusion is the whole point of the campaign to get people to use the word "socialism" so broadly. It's supposed to make you feel the same about Norway and the Khmer Rouge.
This kind of thing is the contemporary American version of "Doublespeak" -- an attempt to control what people think by making it impossible for them to express certain forbidden ideas.
Although it does make it hard to discuss things without triggering irrational emotional responses, in the end doublespeak is futile. We have a generation of young people who think they are "socialists" because they look at the Nordic system and it seems reasonable to them. By in large they don't embrace "production for use" or the labor theory of value, although the rehabilitation of the word "socialism" may set the stage for a comeback for those ideas too. What most them are, are socially progressive capitalists.
Liberals would be more inclined to serve in the military of a social-democratic state like Norway.
There was no left-right difference in attitudes toward military service in the US until Vietnam. Vietnam draft deferments for the wealthy is what soured the left on the US military; the Establishment was for the war, but it had no skin in the game.
Well, on the other hand Norway gets 98% of its electricity from renewable sources, and only 2% from fossil fuels, and about half of cars sold there are fully electric or plug-in hybrid.
And speaking of getting rich raping Mother Earth, if fossil fuels are the reason why Norwegian millennials are rich, why aren't Russian millenials rich?
"Cultivation of the customer" - you mean, mass psychological manipulation?
Yes, that's certainly party of what I mean. It's not the whole story; Amazon is really, really good at fulfillment. But they aren't satisfied with simply serving customers.
Oh, you can throw money at a problem and lose. For most people overfunding is a recipe for loss of focus: money replaces decision-making. Most of the time the best place to be is to have just enough money to do what you need to get done if you're smart about it.
Amazon's actually pretty good at what it does. That's because it's more disciplined than other companies that have tried to throw money at the problem of growing large. That doesn't make it a good thing in the long term.
Because Amazon is a growth stock, the business equivalent of a cancer cell. If you bought $1000 of Amazon in 2004, you'd have almost $40,0000 today. This means investors don't expect dividends, they expect all the profits to be plowed into growing to pump the stock price ever higher.
Amazon has also had more effective leadership than most companies with similar ambitions. I think Bezos really ego-identifies with Amazon; that keeps him laser-focused on what makes Amazon a truly dominant player: it's cultivation of the customer. The hardest and most expensive thing in business is getting a new customer, so Amazon is obsessive on new ways to sell to its "Prime" customer base. Amazon puts its tendrils into prime customers' lives; gathering ever more information on them and providing instantaneous links between the buying impulse and consumption.
Look at the difference between Amazon's acquisitions and typical CEO-compensation driven acquisitions. Amazon's acquisitions aren't driven by empty buzzwords like "synergy"; they're about gaining a bigger footprint in its prime customers' lives, or obtaining something it needs to do that.
Amazon wins because it's better at selling shit to people than anyone has ever been. It uses its customer base more effectively than anyone else has ever done before. This is through a combination of new technology, leadership, and investor willingness to plot profits right back into growth.
In isolation this is a good thing. We are all taking a journey with Amazon in which the next step is a marginal improvement in our lives. We might not like where this takes us, however. Amazon is on track to becoming the single most powerful human institution ever.
It's probably not true that stealth is obsolete -- yet. Stealth was never quite as good as people were sold on it being, as a kind of invisibility cloak. Even if a radar can detect a stealth aircraft, that doesn't mean you can shoot it down with radar-guided missiles. Even if it is possible to shoot down a stealth aircraft with radar-guided missiles, it doesn't mean that you'll be able to do it as often.
So I think the issue of stealth comes to this question: does cost of stealth -- in dollars, complexity, and performance limitations -- outweigh the benefits?
That's dependent on the state of stealth counter-measures, which everyone including us is working on. Our work on counter-measures may be why Russia just canceled the Su-57; it wasn't far enough ahead of the curve to cost justify. That might not be the case for our stealth technology yet, but even if it were we'd never cancel the F35. American defense contractors are too politically powerful.
And that gets to the problem of using hypersonic missiles that are supposed to cost a few million apiece. If that's the plan, by the time they're ready they'll cost tens if not hundreds of millions. If a defense contractor is successful at making a system indispensable to US military plans, they face no real consequences to cost overruns. If we think we have to have it, we'll pay for it no matter how much it costs.
On the trade war, it's important to be clear about who the participants in the war are and what their role is. It's not the US vs. China; it's the US government against the Chinese government, with the Chinese government playing the game with the assets of the Chinese nation.
It's not that the Communist Party is immune to popular economic pain, but the time scales of political effect are assymetrical. The party can afford to play a longer (although not indefinitely prolonged) game than US politicians can.
This is a bit like invading Russia. It's a truism that invading Russia is a bad idea; like most truisms it's only true some of the time. Sure there are historical examples of disastrous invasions, but there are just as many examples of successful invasions. Success depends on how strong the internal Russian government was at the the time you choose to attack.
A trade war with the PRC isn't an intrinsically bad idea; it's a matter of timing. It's just like invading Russia: sometimes you can pull it off, other times you can't.
Sometimes a weapon works best if it achieves its effect without being used. Naval theorists call this "fleet in being" -- achieving sea control without leaving port simply by being there. But that's only effective if the enemy is aware your unbeatable super-dreadnought exists and believes it is where you want them to believe.
Likewise, imagine the US-Soviet conflict if the Soviet Union had been unaware of the existence of the US nuclear stockpile. Sure, it would be better if the Soviets had certain misconceptions about that arsenal (e.g. how precisely it could be delivered), but it was critically important that they accurately understood the size and destructive power of the thing.
Strategy is about imposing behavioral constraints on your opponent, and a completely-in-the-dark opponent can't be controlled at all. Of course you can't believe what a rival says because misinformation is so strategically useful; however the truth often serves as well or better than a lie.
While you do want to control what a rival believes if you can, it's naive and simplistic to believe that a more ignorant opponent is always the better option. Likewise it's a mistake to believe that weakening your opponent is always a good idea.
Slashdot Mirror
On the ketchup thing, ketchup was originally (in the 17th century) a fermented fish sauce. In the 18th century the primary ingredient in ketchup was mushrooms. Tomato ketchup is relatively new, appearing in the 19th century.
The very history of tomato ketchup disproves the idea that people don't like change; the truth is people vary by the degree to which they seek out and enjoy novel experiences. But I think there's a kind of uncanny valley effect when something isn't quite different enough to seem new; rather it seems "not right". It'd be easier to get someone to like mushroom ketchup, which is brown, than tomato ketchup which was colored brown.
Corporate raiders do not raid startups. They raid established firms with assets that can offset debts.
Startups are a totally different case. First of all, they are more likely to fail than to succeed, and the reason they fail is they run out of cash to pay current obligations. Now when that starts to happen, and they can't raise more cash, so they go to the creditor for more favorable terms, and that's one place where a creditor can deal himself in in various ways because he's got you by the short hairs.
Actually, giving workers a million dollars wouldn't make them happier. Studies show that the marginal hedonic value of income is essentially zero once you get to a certain point (about $70K/year). Studies of lottery winners show that a year after winning they are on average only slightly happier than before winning; and I'd bet if you confined the study to people who had more than $70,000 of income the hedonic value of winning would be zero.
It's a shame that money has such little hedonic value, because research shows that improving employee mood improves productivity. If money were all that mattered, HR would be reduced to a number on a spreadsheet: the optimal amount of money to pay any given employee.
It should come as no shock that employee mood has an effect on productivity, but the bad news is that most of an individual's equilibrium point for happiness is genetic. It's important to hire positive people because managing someone who is a pill is a never-ending exercise in spitting into the wind.
The single evidence-based happiness factor that employers have the greatest input into is the strength of an employee's social connections. This isn't just about giving an employee time and encouragement to pursue family and friendships; it's about fostering a positive atmosphere at work. The things is, it's hard.
Well, if four days is a bad idea, why not a six day week? What makes five days the perfect amount of time to work for all jobs?
The answer is that there is no optimal number that's right for all jobs. If you're a dairy farmer the cows have to be milked seven days a week. If you're a paper pusher, that next piece of paper can usually wait longer than a cow.
My own observations of desk workers is that the longer they spend at the desk, the larger proportion of time they spend at non-productive tasks. I've known people who habitually put in sixty hours a week who never are working very hard. Is the long week the cause of low work intensity, or vice versa? I'd say both: it's a vicious circle.
If you made no other changes, reducing a desk worker's week from five days to four would make him less productive, but probably not 20% less productive. But an intelligent plan wouldn't leave things to chance; you'd set a pace of work that is sustainable for four days but not for five. You'd disallow a lot of time-wasting activities that are tolerated now because the work week has plenty of hours in it.
Would that work for every job? Of course not. But there's no reason to think that five eight hour days is optimal for every job or person either.
First of all, this is credit, not investment. It's a different game, because if things go belly up as creditor you're at the head of the line to be repaid; as an owner you're at the tail. I've seen deals where creditors moved in, took over IP and other assets put up as collateral, and started up successful companies without the debt burden the technology's creators were operating under. Unless the other investors or owners can come up with a huge bag of cash immediately, they end up with nothing.
If you've got deep enough pockets, being the largest creditor could be a better way to obtain the fruits of a startup's labor than buying an ownership position.
Also, even if this were taking an ownership stake in the company, China as a nation with 1/5 of a world's population is in a different position than an individual investor, who should be focused on future profits. China is playing a minimax strategy where the payoff is national power, not money. An individual who invests out of fears of "missing out" is being irrational; a nation may be choosing to hedge its bets in a very different game. And as a sovereign state China can simply do things that would be illegal for an individual, so the rules of the game it's playing look very different.
Maybe the phone vendor has a different vision for what an app store should contain.
Now granted, this is a common type of excuse for making life difficult for customers who want to switch vendors, but there are legitimate reasons for doing something like that, like catering to customers with special security concerns. Or maybe you'd want to offer an app store that only had open source apps.
This is where context matters. How much choice does the consumer have? Since Android has about 85% of the smartphone market, and apple about 15%, the answer is not much.
The point of standard of identity regulations is so that consumers aren't fooled into buying one thing when they think they are buying another. It's consumer-friendly regulation. It prevents companies from selling margarine as "butter".
But "soy milk", "almond milk" and "coconut milk" are the proper English names for those things; everybody knows they don't come out of a cow -- in fact that's the whole point of those products. So why is the administration looking at this question?
It's the kind of regulatory position that's "business friendly" to friendly businesses. While big agribusiness donated more to Clinton (because they wanted TPP), dairy and meat backed Trump. You can see the Trump adminstration cares about dairy; we're probably going to have a trade war with Canada over milk.
Paper ballots with machine tallying combines the most of the best features of both systems and is cheap, logistically simple, and auditable. It also scales with license or technical limitations. I live in a state which uses that system and if turnout is heavy at the polling place they just set up another row of cheap pop-up voting booths, doubling the polling place's throughput for less than a price of a single voting machine.
Of course one man's bug is sometimes another man's feature.
I'm convinced that the reason these machines are so popular despite their cost, insecurity, and logistical burden is that they enable political parties to manipulate election results, not by hacking, but simply using the bottleneck they represent to generate long lines in precincts unfavorable to them.
The Man finally figured out that stealing money is for chumps. The best crime is to steal the whole country.
That trains has left the station, because of lobbying.
If you as a voter sell your vote, that's a crime. If the person you vote for sells his votes in Congress, that's constituent services.
You are talking about software engineering approaches to securing the system. Those are important, but the overall system design has to be secure, otherwise it doesn't matter how secure the operating system is.
A better approach would be to have the system print out human readable, machine readable paper ballots, which the voter carries from the voting booth to a secure ballot box. This wouldn't prevent the machine from mismarking ballots, but there would be a high probability of someone detecting an effort large enough to swing an election.
They wouldn't have that problem if they went with the other, cooler options: giant cockroach robots.
You are absolutely correct that from a market standpoint there is no such thing as a shortage or a surplus, provided you make certain simplifying assumptions, namely (1) that if the price rises the quantities supplied can rise (in effect) instantaneously and (2) there are no externalities -- costs that are borne by people who aren't a party to the transaction.
Some commodities like gold can increase in supply relatively quickly as prices go up. There are marginal gold mines that start up and shut down as gold prices fluctuate because the concentration of gold in their ore is on the lower end of what is economic to recover.
At the other end of hte spectrum, consider brain surgery. If we suddenly discovered a lot more people needed brain surgery than previously believed, the pay for brain surgeons would go up, but the supply of brain surgeons would take years to change. During those years you would have a shortage.
Externalities can also cause markets to undersupply. Lets assume the number of pilots is too low for our "national security needs", whatever they are. This is not a problem for the airlines, nor the pilots; those national security needs are external to the transaction between them. So a shortage can exist, because it is not a shortage from the point of view of the airlines. It's not their problem, but that doesn't mean it's nobody's problem.
What we need to do is give the pilot's job to robots.
Well, it was a rhetorical question with a rather obvious answer. The real interesting question is why people in places like Russia put up with it? That's a very important thing for Americans to be thinking about.
Here's something to chew on, though. Norway ranks #1 in the world for press freedom; Russia ranks #148. This is good proxy for overall political freedom and the degree to which the people control the government, and vice versa.
Well, you're implicitly assuming there is one kind of politics which employs identity and another kind that doesn't. I don't think so. All politics is "identity politics", the only difference is whether an identity sees itself as marginalized or in a dominant position.
The dissatisfaction you have with people's "identity politics" is just the dissatisfaction everyone has with people who have different agenda from them. No matter who you are, people who are different from you demanding concessions.
Moving energy by powerline is no way cheaper than moving petro to your gas station....
Tesla's charging stations are all getting solar, with the goal of removing them from the grid entirely. You could do the same thing.
Grid losses are dependent upon the state where you live; they run from 2.2% to around 13%, with the nationwide average being around 10% losses. However, once the energy is in your electric car, you lose a further 40% of it before it drives the wheels; for gasoline engines the further losses are 80% (source: Trump Administration).
So even if you live in the worst case state for electricity transmission losses, and the gasoline you use magically appears at the pump with no energy inputs for refining and transport, you're still losing more net energy with your gasoline car than with your electric vehicle.
People in the US are conditioned to think in black and white. Americans even use the same word -- "socialism" -- to refer to Maoist China and the contemporary Scandinavian countries. In fact, that confusion is the whole point of the campaign to get people to use the word "socialism" so broadly. It's supposed to make you feel the same about Norway and the Khmer Rouge.
This kind of thing is the contemporary American version of "Doublespeak" -- an attempt to control what people think by making it impossible for them to express certain forbidden ideas.
Although it does make it hard to discuss things without triggering irrational emotional responses, in the end doublespeak is futile. We have a generation of young people who think they are "socialists" because they look at the Nordic system and it seems reasonable to them. By in large they don't embrace "production for use" or the labor theory of value, although the rehabilitation of the word "socialism" may set the stage for a comeback for those ideas too. What most them are, are socially progressive capitalists.
Liberals would be more inclined to serve in the military of a social-democratic state like Norway.
There was no left-right difference in attitudes toward military service in the US until Vietnam. Vietnam draft deferments for the wealthy is what soured the left on the US military; the Establishment was for the war, but it had no skin in the game.
Well, on the other hand Norway gets 98% of its electricity from renewable sources, and only 2% from fossil fuels, and about half of cars sold there are fully electric or plug-in hybrid.
And speaking of getting rich raping Mother Earth, if fossil fuels are the reason why Norwegian millennials are rich, why aren't Russian millenials rich?
"Cultivation of the customer" - you mean, mass psychological manipulation?
Yes, that's certainly party of what I mean. It's not the whole story; Amazon is really, really good at fulfillment. But they aren't satisfied with simply serving customers.
Oh, you can throw money at a problem and lose. For most people overfunding is a recipe for loss of focus: money replaces decision-making. Most of the time the best place to be is to have just enough money to do what you need to get done if you're smart about it.
Amazon's actually pretty good at what it does. That's because it's more disciplined than other companies that have tried to throw money at the problem of growing large. That doesn't make it a good thing in the long term.
Because Amazon is a growth stock, the business equivalent of a cancer cell. If you bought $1000 of Amazon in 2004, you'd have almost $40,0000 today. This means investors don't expect dividends, they expect all the profits to be plowed into growing to pump the stock price ever higher.
Amazon has also had more effective leadership than most companies with similar ambitions. I think Bezos really ego-identifies with Amazon; that keeps him laser-focused on what makes Amazon a truly dominant player: it's cultivation of the customer. The hardest and most expensive thing in business is getting a new customer, so Amazon is obsessive on new ways to sell to its "Prime" customer base. Amazon puts its tendrils into prime customers' lives; gathering ever more information on them and providing instantaneous links between the buying impulse and consumption.
Look at the difference between Amazon's acquisitions and typical CEO-compensation driven acquisitions. Amazon's acquisitions aren't driven by empty buzzwords like "synergy"; they're about gaining a bigger footprint in its prime customers' lives, or obtaining something it needs to do that.
Amazon wins because it's better at selling shit to people than anyone has ever been. It uses its customer base more effectively than anyone else has ever done before. This is through a combination of new technology, leadership, and investor willingness to plot profits right back into growth.
In isolation this is a good thing. We are all taking a journey with Amazon in which the next step is a marginal improvement in our lives. We might not like where this takes us, however. Amazon is on track to becoming the single most powerful human institution ever.
It's probably not true that stealth is obsolete -- yet. Stealth was never quite as good as people were sold on it being, as a kind of invisibility cloak. Even if a radar can detect a stealth aircraft, that doesn't mean you can shoot it down with radar-guided missiles. Even if it is possible to shoot down a stealth aircraft with radar-guided missiles, it doesn't mean that you'll be able to do it as often.
So I think the issue of stealth comes to this question: does cost of stealth -- in dollars, complexity, and performance limitations -- outweigh the benefits?
That's dependent on the state of stealth counter-measures, which everyone including us is working on. Our work on counter-measures may be why Russia just canceled the Su-57; it wasn't far enough ahead of the curve to cost justify. That might not be the case for our stealth technology yet, but even if it were we'd never cancel the F35. American defense contractors are too politically powerful.
And that gets to the problem of using hypersonic missiles that are supposed to cost a few million apiece. If that's the plan, by the time they're ready they'll cost tens if not hundreds of millions. If a defense contractor is successful at making a system indispensable to US military plans, they face no real consequences to cost overruns. If we think we have to have it, we'll pay for it no matter how much it costs.
On the trade war, it's important to be clear about who the participants in the war are and what their role is. It's not the US vs. China; it's the US government against the Chinese government, with the Chinese government playing the game with the assets of the Chinese nation.
It's not that the Communist Party is immune to popular economic pain, but the time scales of political effect are assymetrical. The party can afford to play a longer (although not indefinitely prolonged) game than US politicians can.
This is a bit like invading Russia. It's a truism that invading Russia is a bad idea; like most truisms it's only true some of the time. Sure there are historical examples of disastrous invasions, but there are just as many examples of successful invasions. Success depends on how strong the internal Russian government was at the the time you choose to attack.
A trade war with the PRC isn't an intrinsically bad idea; it's a matter of timing. It's just like invading Russia: sometimes you can pull it off, other times you can't.
Sometimes a weapon works best if it achieves its effect without being used. Naval theorists call this "fleet in being" -- achieving sea control without leaving port simply by being there. But that's only effective if the enemy is aware your unbeatable super-dreadnought exists and believes it is where you want them to believe.
Likewise, imagine the US-Soviet conflict if the Soviet Union had been unaware of the existence of the US nuclear stockpile. Sure, it would be better if the Soviets had certain misconceptions about that arsenal (e.g. how precisely it could be delivered), but it was critically important that they accurately understood the size and destructive power of the thing.
Strategy is about imposing behavioral constraints on your opponent, and a completely-in-the-dark opponent can't be controlled at all. Of course you can't believe what a rival says because misinformation is so strategically useful; however the truth often serves as well or better than a lie.
While you do want to control what a rival believes if you can, it's naive and simplistic to believe that a more ignorant opponent is always the better option. Likewise it's a mistake to believe that weakening your opponent is always a good idea.