Science Fiction: Shadows Of Eternity By Gregory Benford

(Drivebycuriosity) - The universe seems to be infinite. There must exist many civilizations somewhere. What could we learn from them? Years ago humans started a Search for Exterrestrial Inteligence, known as SETI, and founded 1984 a SETI Institute, "whose mission is to explore, understand, and explain the origin and nature of life in the universe, and to apply the knowledge gained to inspire and guide present and future generations"  (wikipedia).

Gregory Benford´s novel "Shadows of Eternity", is set on the moon, some centuries in the future ( amazon). Then the humans have received, collected & researched myriads of messages from alien cultures, many light years away and maybe are already extinct. The exterrestrial messages are collected in a huge SETI library on the moon. The plot follows Rachel, a young aspiring librarian @ SETI, who is tasked to analyze some of the alien messages. What will she discover? (this is a spoiler free blog)

The alien messages are advanced software programs, a kind of artificial intelligence. These programs are aware of themselves and see themselves as the servants of their senders and they are able to communicate with librarians like Rachel.

Benford spiced his novel with a lot of science and interwove cosmology, evolution, biology & sociology into an interesting plot, a melange of space opera and exotic adventure tale. Many of his ideas are very speculative, but plausible because they are based on science.

I enjoyed how Benford elaborately described exotic & weird situations and environments and had fun to follow Rachel, the SETI library hierarchy and their encounters and experiences.

Benford belongs to my favorite authors.  I have reread his novel "In the Ocean of the Night" many times (driveby) and love many of his short stories ( driveby). He writes hard science fiction in the tradition of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke and mingles fascinating tales with science. The logical, analytical and scientific style of his novels & short stories shows that the author also has a career as professor and astrophysicist on the faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine since 1971 (wikipedia).

Contemporary Art: National Bird @ Aicon Gallery New York

 (Drivebycuriosity) - Recently I saw a group exhibiton @ Aicon Gallery, called "Notes From The Motherland" (aicongallery. ). I already displayed the paintings by Nadia Waheed  (  driveby).

 

 

 

 

This post is dedicated to images by Anuj Shrestha, who works as an illustrator for "The New Yorker", "Washington Post" and lots of other magazines and newspapers ( anujink). The images I spotted at the  gallery tell apparently a story, called "National Bird".

 

To be continued 

 

 

Contemporary Art: Pat Passlof`s Abstracts @ Eric Firestone Gallery New York

 

(Drivebycuriosity) - New York City does not only live from finance, entertainment & tourism. Big Apple is also a mecca of art. Recently I discovered an interesting show @ Aicon Gallery on Great Jones Street ( my post  driveby  ). Across the street I noticed another interesting show @ Eric Firestone Gallery. They displayed abstracts by Pat Passlof (1928-2011
 ericfirestone).

 

 

On top of this post you can see " what is rome" (1960, oil on linen) followed by "Untitled" (1962, oil on canvas paper) & "March Bird" (1956, oil on linen).

 

 

 

 

 

 

To be continued

Books: The Money Game By George Goodman

 (Drivebycuriosity) - Is the stock market a game? Maybe not in the long run. The chart below shows that the market accompanies the climbing company profits over the time. But the short run might be different (I wrote about the difference  here).

 

 

 (  source)

 

Adam Smith (a pseudonym for George Goodman) focuses on the short run. His book "The Money Game" (originally published 1968) is about games and gamblers on the stock market (amazon ). I read the book decades ago and reread it now on Kindle.

Smith/Goodman was very smart and had apparently quite an amount of market experience and economic knowledge. He also had read a lot - and learned from it. You might know the term "Wisdom of the Masses". Smith quotes David Mackay´s book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" (published 1841!) and writes about bubbles, panics and crashes. One chapter is called "Is the Market really a Crowd".

Smith could write very well and described in an entertaining & humorous way the philosophies and psychological mindsets of stock market investors & speculators, the  players. I enjoyed the row of case studies spiced with plenty of funny anecdotes about different kinds of persons who tried their luck. The text gets enriched by a lot quotes from Sigmund Freud, John Maynard Keynes and plenty of stock market gurus and other pundits. Smith muses about conflicting strategies - which apparently didn´t change much in all the years. 

It`s interesting that in the 1960s existed almost as many computer and other hot technology stocks as today. Can we learn something from the ancient highflyers? There is also an entertaining chapter about speculation in cocoa - even today´s commodities investors could learn something.

"The Money Game" has aged well, its still fun to read and I could still learn something.

Contemporary Art: Nadia Waheed @ Aicon Gallery New York

 (Drivebycuriosity) - Contemporary art is full of discoveries. On a walk through Manhattan I passed Aicon Gallery on Great Jones Street. The gallery specializes in modern and contemporary non-Western art with a special focus on South Asia. This time they showed work by Nadia Waheed and others. The exhibition is called "Notes From The Motherland" (aicongallery. ). 

 

This post is about Waheed´s paintings. She is born in Saudi Arabia but originally from Pakistan, Nadia Waheed (b. 1992, BFA 2015 School of the Art Institute of Chicago  mindysolomon)

On top  you can see "Red C, Dead C" (2021, Oil on canvas) followed by “Danaides Redux” (2021, Oil on canvas) & “Pilgrims, Sojourners” (2021 Oil on canvas  ).

Above follows “And I Promise You, I" (2021, Oil on Caravaggio 504, polyester canvas).

To be continued

Economics: Are Amazon`s Prices Really Too Low"?

(Drivebycuriosity) - America has a long antitrust tradition. The trustbusters tried to prevent that monopolies & cartels harm the consumers and charge too high prices. Since President Biden came into office a new group of new trustbusters, who call themselves "progressives", came to power. They don´t care about consumers, prices and economics. They see big companies, especially Amazon,  generally as evil and they try to fight them whatever they do.

President Biden appointed Lina Khan, a "progressive" activist who became famous by writing an anti-Amazon pamphlet, to chairperson of the powerful Federal Trade Commission (FTC), America´s antitrust authority.  "Lina Khan, has an explicit beef with Amazon and has stated publicly, absent any formal hearing, that the company is guilty of antitrust violations and should be broken up." (yalejreg.com wsj.com). 

Instead of fighting against price hikes the progressives  fight against low prices. Biden protege Khan laments that Amazon is too cheap which is bad (yalelawjournal reason).  She claims that Amazon`s low prices squeeze competitors out of the market and create a monopoly (lawyers call this predation). 

Really? Since Amazon started in the late 1990s it has been charging low prices, but the number of competitors has been swiftly climbing year over year. In spite of Amazon´s "too low and predatory prices" (Kahn) there are now thousands of companies selling online, including giants like Walmart, Target, Best Buy & Costco, who all developed large online departments, and there exist also a lot online platforms like Overstock, Shopify, Wayfair, Etsy & Ebay, who all are copying Amazon`s success. Many of them are growing faster than Amazon (emarketer ). 

Amazon`s success did not hinter potential competitors, quite the opposite, it inspired many others to offer similar services. A former Amazon employee used his knowledge to start in 2012 Instacart, an online grocery with annual revenues around $1.5 billion. These competitors all are getting better over the time, challenging Amazon more and more. Apparently Khan lost the sense of reality.

The alleged predation, becoming a monopolist by cutting prices so low that other shops cannot compete anymore (price dumping), does not make sense. If the new born monopolist would hike prices again (to cover the losses caused by price dumping), the new profits would immediately attract new competitors. 

Does anyone believe that Amazon can get so cheap that Walmart, Target and the rest of the US retail would go out of business?  In 2016 Walmart acquired Amazon competitor Jet.com and transformed it into her own e-commerce department. If Amazon would really attack the competitor Shopify with extremely discounted prices - as some naive trustbusters believe ( recode) - Walmart, or another big corporation (including hedge fund), could buy the e-commerce platform. Amazon would rather go bankrupt than squeeze Walmart, Target & Co. out of the market.

Amazon has low prices because they created a huge network of distribution centers which are efficient and reduce the average costs. Amazon`s rise created more competition not less because it inspired many others to become the "next Amazon". The competition with Amazon forces the whole retail industry to innovate as well. Amazon`s rise forced US retail to act efficient, to cut costs and to curb prices. Without Amazon today´s inflation rate would even be higher. Biden and Elizabeth Warren claim that the inflation is caused by the "greed" of big corporations, but Biden´s trustbusters want to fight Amazon´s low prices!

The hipster antitrust movement ignores, maybe even doesn`t understand, that the power of companies is  constrained by competition (except competition if forbidden by patents or other laws. Don´t print US Dollars!) When a corporation has success, her rising profits attracts automatically others who want a share from the pie. The Internet makes it very easy to compare prices and to switch to other shops, news providers & entertainers, sharpening the competition. Customers can choose the company which has the best quality, the best service and/or the lowest prices which gives the consumers a lot power. As a result, customers have more power than the corporations.

Millions depend on Amazon`s fast reliable deliveries and benefit from low prices. Amazon makes the US economy more efficient and curbs the inflation. But the arrogant progressives want to stop the company for ideological reasons.

 

 

Books: Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime By Sean Carroll

(Drivebycuriosity) - Quantum Mechanics is famous for bizarre phenomena. "Schrödinger`s Cat" and Heisenberg`s uncertainty principle belong to the popular culture. Albert Einstein didn´t like that, he called Quantum  Mechanics "spooky". But Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist, does not agree. His book "Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime"  tries to drive the fun out of Quantum Mechanics ( amazon).

For instance he claims that "popular discussions of quantum field theory will often describe the vacuum as full of ´quantum fluctuations`or even ´particles popping in and out of existence in empty space`. That`s an evocative picture, but it´s more false than true." Carroll also define the uncertainty principle, entanglement, Schrödinger´s cat away and replaces them by complex iterations. And he spends a lot of time and pages on collapsing wave functions.

Unfortunately Carroll`s book did not work for me. His remarks are too esoteric for my taste. Apparently Carroll wants to show how smart he is and tries to impress his circle of theoretic physicists. This book might be for them, not for me. I had more fun reading Stephen Hawking`s "A Brief History of time" was fun and Carlo Rovelli`s "Seven Brief Lessons On Physics" & John Polkinghorne "Quantum Theory" were at least digestible. "Something Deeply Hidden" is not.

Books: Why I Did Not Finish Reading "The Queen Of The Night"

(Drivebycuriosity) - I like to read a lot. I am always searching for interesting literature. Sometimes I get inspired by reviews - and even advertisements. "The Queen Of The Night" by Alexander Che appeared on my radar because I find the subject - historical novel & opera - fascinating and the book got rave reviews. The "Queen" is a "New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and a Best Book of the Year from NPR, Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, and others. The mesmerizing story of one woman's rise from circus rider to courtesan to world-renowned diva is a brilliant performance" (Washington Post)" ( amazon).

The book was a disappointment. I got repelled because of the affected and stilted style and the cliches. Here one example:

"They introduced themselves, but I knew very well who they were. Brother dukes, known to most for their handsome profiles, philanthropic works, enormous wealth, and most important to me on this evening, their reputation for returning women from an evening in their company with their dresses cut to pieces by sabers - and for supplying those women afterward with more dresses in return, presumably to meet the same fate"

I could not swallow more than 500 pages of Che`s pompous and pretentious style, so I gave up reading after a few pages. I could have accepted the novel anyway if it would have be written by a woman. But Alexander Che is an American fiction writer, poet, journalist and reviewer, born on Rhode Island. What does he know about the live of an opera singer in the 19th century? Apparently he copied Balzac and other writers from 19th century.

The reviews show that his sheme works, but not for me.

 

 

Economics: Why The New Antitrust Movement Is Unjustified And Harmful

 

(Drivebycuriosity) - America has a long tradition of antitrust. The Sherman Act from 1890, founded by Senator John Sherman, aimed to protect the consumers. The antitrusters tried to stop monopolies & cartels from harming consumers by charging too high prices and delivering bad services. America`s  trustbusters broke up Standard Oil in 1911,  AT&T’s Bell System monopoly in 1983 and performed a crusade against Microsoft in the 1990s. 

Until recently America`s antitrust focused on consumer welfare and economics. The trustbusters tried to block corporate mergers that would lead to higher prices. But they blessed business deals that aim to increase efficiency, promote innovation and would drive prices lower ( politico). 

President Biden supports a new antitrust trend, known as hipster antitrust. A new group of new trustbusters, who call themselves "progressives", came to power. They don´t care about consumers, prices and economics. They see big companies, especially Amazon, Apple, Google & Facebook, generally as evil and they try to fight Big Tech whatever they do.

Biden appointed Lina Khan, a "progressive" activist who became famous by writing an anti-Amazon pamphlet, to chairperson of the powerful Federal Trade Commission (FTC), America´s antitrust authority. Khan is fundamentally changing the FTC and how America approaches competition policy (inside ). "Lina Khan, has an explicit beef with Amazon and has stated publicly, absent any formal hearing, that the company is guilty of antitrust violations and should be broken up. (yalejreg.com wsj.com).  

Biden also supports other "progressives" in their crusade against Big Tech, including Elizabeth Warren, Tim Wu (White House National Economic Council), Jonathan Kanter (Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust) Rohit Chopra (Director, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau), David Cicilline. None of the new antitrust activists is an economist, they all are lawyers who are not educated in economics.

The new trust busters began a crusade against Big Tech. They claim that Amazon, Google, Apple & Facebook have monopoly power and that the technology giants abuse their alleged power and harm the economy. Sen. Warren claims: "Today’s big tech companies have too much power — too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy. They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else. And in the process, they have hurt small businesses and stifled innovation" ( teamwarren).

Is big really so bad? Apple, Google, Facebook & Amazon became huge because billions use their services and buy their products. Big Tech doesn`t need to be our friend, but the giants have to behave friendly otherwise they would go out of business. Adam Smith declared “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest”. If the customers wouldn`t be served well, they would walk away. If Big Tech would be too expensive, too slow, too inconvenient, too unreliable, their customers would leave. Consumers love Big Tech because they benefit from them. The Big Tech haters don´t understand these basic facts, maybe they don´t even care.

Instead of fighting against price hikes the progressive trustbusters fight against price cutting, claiming that lower prices squeeze competitors out of the market and create a monopoly (lawyers call this predation). Biden protege Khan laments that Amazon is too cheap which is bad (yalelawjournal ). Really? Since Amazon started in the late 1990s, offering low prices, the number of competitors has been swiftly climbing year over year. Today there are thousand of companies selling online, including giants like Walmart, Target, Best Buy & Costco, who all developed large online departments, and there are also online platforms like Overstock, Shopify, Wayfair, Etsy & Ebay, who all are copying Amazon`s success. A former Amazon employed used his knowledge to start in 2012 Instacart, an online grocery with annual revenues around $1.5 billion. These competitors all are getting better over the time, challenging Amazon more and more. Apparently Khan lost the sense of reality. 

Amazon has low prices because they created a huge network of distribution centers which are efficient and reduce the average costs. The competition with Amazon forces the whole retail industry to act efficient, to cut costs and to curb prices. Without Amazon today´s inflation rate would even be higher. How to explain that to economic illiterates like Khan & Co?

The hipster antitrust movement ignores, maybe even doesn`t understand, that there is plenty of competition. History shows that the power of companies is always constrained by competition. When a corporation has success, her rising profits attract automatically others who want a share from the pie. The Internet makes it very easy to compare prices and to switch to other shops, news providers & entertainers, sharpening the competition. Customers can choose the company which has the best quality, the best service and/or the lowest prices which gives the consumers a lot power. As a result, customers have more power than the corporations.

The other Big Tech companies aren`t monopolies either. Nobody is forced to buy Apple`s iPhones, iPads, iMacs, MacBooks and services. Customers can purchase similar products & services from Microsoft, Google, Samsung, Huawei and a lot of other technology companies. And customers can choose between Apple´s iOS and Google`s Android. Nobody needs to use Google services like search & maps. There are other search engines like Microsoft`s Bing, DuckDuck Go, Yandex & WolframAlpha and people also can use Apple Maps, MapQuest or TomTom. The Facebook/Instagram tandem competes against Twitter for users and advertiser dollars.

Senator Warren and other trust busters claim that Big Tech companies "have hurt small businesses and stifled innovation". Really? Did they ever hear of Uber,  Lyft, Arbnb & Pinterest?  These so-called unicorns came out of nowhere. They were founded just years ago and are already valued $80 billion and more (nypost). 

Contrary to the claims of Khan & Co. Amazon did not stop the growth of new online sellers. The Canadian e-commerce platform Shopify, founded in 2006,  reached a market capitalization of about $150 billion, Wayfair, an e-commerce site for home supplies, started in 2002 and reached a market capitalization of around $18 billion  and Casper, launched in 2014, who sells mattresses online, became a brand name almost over night.

Senator Klobuchar drafted a bill which aims to give Khan and her FTC much more power (cnbc    springboard ). She wants to end Amazon`s Marketplace where the company sells - besides her own products - the products of other shops and she wants to prevent Amazon from offering its low-cost Basics brand products  ( yalejreg ). Klobuchar also wants to ban Amazon from offering free shipping on select products through Amazon Prime. The Senator ignores that powerful competitors like Walmart & Target - and many other retailers - have been doing the same business for years ( reason). 

Ignoring the strength of Walmart and other traditional retailers Klobuchar wants to fine Amazon with 15% of the revenues for just doing its business, which would empower big competitors like Walmart. Corruption? That`s not enough. Klobuchar also wants to stop Google to show Google Maps on her search results. Apparently Klobuchar, Khan & Warren try to destroy America´s big technology firms for ideological reasons.

      Punishing Growth & Efficiency
 

The crusade is not only unjustified, it does also harm to the society. Khan & Co. want to punish growth and efficiency. If the crusaders get their will many services - including Amazon Prime which offers free shipping in a very short time - will not be available any more or for much higher prices (medium ). The proposed reforms would especially hurt families who rely on digital shopping and online communication every day. Many small retailers would go out of business because they would loose Amazon´s efficient online platform & logistic services to sell nationwide. America´s inflation would accelerate because the downwards price pressure by Amazon would disappear. 

The pursued regulatory overkill would also create more bureaucracy which " is the death of any achievement” according to Einstein. New regulations and restrictions reduce the productivity & efficiency of Big Tech companies; they shrink their abilities to further innovate, making business more complicated and costly. 

The trustbusters want to throw sand into the gears of successful companies, which are the engine of the US economy. New regulations and inquiries reduce Big Tech`s  abilities to further innovate because they are occupying management capacities and are slowing decision processes - making business more complicated and costly. Innovators and startups would be discouraged when they know that strong growth would be punished.

Big Tech`s strategic thinkers will be preoccupied with new regulations & inquiries and will have less time & energy for innovations. Instead of thinking about new products & services for their customers and to improve existing ones the strategists will have to think about new laws and how to comply with external bureaucrats and investigations. The continuous attacks of the trustbusters already cause huge costs for Big Tech and may force them to hike their prices and/or reduce their services, which would harm the consumers and the US economy. They also will reduce the capabilities to hire new talents and will curb salaries of Big Tech´s employees. 

Climbing costs & bureaucratic frictions create headwinds which will slow growth of innovative & successful companies and with them the US economy.  More regulation also encourages corruption because powerful politicians & bureaucrats can blackmail corporations by threatening them to regulate them more (ssrn). Hello Senator Klobuchar.

Antitrust law was designed to protect the consumers but Washington`s new trustbusters don´t care about customers, they want to create a bureaucratic world as described by Franz Kafka. Khan’s fellow commissioner Rebecca Slaughter demands that “antitrust should be used to accomplish political and social goals” ( thecentersquare). The uncertainty of political demands, let alone new regulations imposed through antitrust enforcement threats and action, amounts to an enormous cost passed directly to American consumers through higher prices and reduced economic dynamism (insidesources). Big Tech are serving the consumers, the society, by spurring price reductions, delivering better quality & innovation. US politicians are making the world a poorer place by fighting the quartet of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple that have helped so many Americans and made the Covid-19 pandemic a little more bearable ( twitter).