You can’t read a lot of opinion pieces about diplomacy or trade without two things leaping out at you about American writers. They are incredibly ignorant of American history and even more ignorant about other societies. That’s what struck me in Michael Schulman’s piece at Bloomberg on the “localized operations” set up in other countries by American companies:

There are many such examples of U.S. companies localizing their operations to target the Chinese market. General Motors Co. manufactures nearly all the cars it sells in China within the country. It even has a car brand, Baojun, developed for and only marketed to Chinese drivers. The vast majority of what the Procter & Gamble Co. sells to Chinese consumers is made locally. The company boasts nine manufacturing plants in China.

Such sales don’t directly factor into the bilateral trade data. Yet it most certainly adds to those companies’ bottom lines. GM and its partners sold one million more vehicles in China than in the U.S. last year. China is P&G’s second-largest market after the U.S. Only Americans eat more Oreos than Chinese do.

The local sway of U.S. companies is an indication of just how sophisticated and global they’ve become. With appealing brands and extensive international expertise, American firms very often invest and manufacture in foreign markets instead of exporting their products from the U.S. By contrast, Chinese companies, like those in emerging markets generally, tend to lack brand power and experience operating abroad. So they capitalize on their low-cost base to export to the U.S. and elsewhere.

That’s reflected in the great disparity of direct investment between the U.S. and China. Since 1990, U.S. companies have invested almost twice as much in China — $256 billion — as Chinese companies have in the U.S. And a huge chunk of China’s investment has been made in only the past two years. To a certain extent, the trade deficit is thus a mark of how much more advanced U.S. corporations are compared to their Chinese counterparts.

Of course, there’s been much hand-wringing over the loss of American jobs due to trade with China as factory work has shifted overseas. But in many cases, the plants constructed in China weren’t replacements for those in the U.S.; they were built to meet local needs. In certain industries, such as P&G’s household wares, shipping from far-off locales is expensive and impractical.

Fortunately, economies are never static and, over time, the disparity between the U.S. and China should narrow naturally. It’s almost certain that, barring a complete collapse of relations between the world’s two largest economies, Chinese companies will expand their presence in the U.S. market and hire American workers as they become more global.

Right off the bat is any of that familiar to you? That’s exactly what American pundits were saying 30 years ago about China. If only we wait long enough and liberalize our trade with them, China will naturally liberalize its politics. The only problem with that is that it was wrong. That hasn’t happened and it hasn’t happened because China is different from the United States. Why can’t Americans come to terms with the reality that other countries are, well, other countries?

Second, U. S. companies didn’t set up operations in France, Germany, Brazil, and dozens of other countries in order to tailor their products to local conditions. They did so because they were compelled to by the governments of those countries. We “localized” because we were forced to. That is the actual history and to deny it is absurd.

If we require the Chinese to do the same things they require of U. S. companies, that they accept U. S. “partners”, that they transfer their technology to those partners, and that goods sold in the U. S. should be manufactured in the U. S., will Chinese companies comply in order to increase their sales? Frankly, I doubt it. Their objective isn’t to maximize sales. It’s to maximize the number of jobs in China.

First, a Trump-loving Florida Man sends pipebombs (functional or not) to variety of Democratic politicians and media figures. Yesterday, a Trump-hating anti-Semite murdered 11 people in a synagogue during a bris.

While I’m sure that there will be all sorts of recommendations for how to prevent future tragedies, I’m going to repeat an observation and a prescription I’ve made here more than once. The observation is that in a country of 330 million people there are always going to be a certain number of crazy people and it doesn’t take much to set them off.

The prescription is lower the temperature and it’s addressed to people writing on social media, people writing for major news outlets, politicians, and, particularly, President Trump. Lower the temperature. Express disagreement without rancor, your concerns without heat. Whipping up the crowd may be an effective way of motivating your supporters but it also has consequences you may not foresee.

Representative democracy depends on moderation and reasoned discourse. Enraged followers doth not a democracy make but a mobocracy and mobs have dynamics all their own.

Years ago I heard a wisecrack that in California a political party was two people and a television set. Now that’s all over the country and it’s one person posting on Facebook. Tone it down just as a matter of self-defense.

Based on Pew Research’s findings social media users are increasingly getting their news from their preferred social media sites and, considering that for most social media sites more of their users get their news from the sites than from cable news, broadcast news, or newspapers, it’s a reasonable inference that quite some number of people get their news from social media alone.

The use of social media by Russia, China, and anyone else so predisposed for publishing disinformation and “fake news” is now well-documented and should give us pause. But not only that. The sites’ censorship rules themselves, removing anything that their censors find offensive, is doubly concerning. Consider this story from the New York Times:

For a few hours after The New York Times published an article about conflict and hunger in Yemen, Facebook temporarily removed posts from readers who had tried to share the report on the social platform.

At issue was a photograph of a starving child.

The article included several images of emaciated children. Some were crying. Some were listless. One, a 7-year-old girl named Amal, was shown gazing to the side, with flesh so paper-thin that her collarbone and rib cage were plainly visible. Tens of thousands of readers shared the article on Facebook, but some got a message notifying them that the post was not in line with Facebook’s community standards.

Whether Facebook and other social media sites recognize it or not they’re deliberately slanting the news and considering how much their stock values depend on what people think of them, that should be of significant concern.

There’s an interesting article on Ice VII, which purportedly is created at high velocities, over at Motherboard:

Research published earlier this month in Physical Review Letters suggests that an exotic phase of water, known as “ice VII” could grow at rates exceeding 1,000 miles per hour under the atmospheric conditions found on alien ocean worlds.

Water exists in three main phases (solid, liquid, and gas) and the phase it occupies is a function of atmospheric pressure and temperature. The solid form of water—ice—has several phases of its own, however most of them exist at extremely low temperatures (but some of them can exist at temperatures upwards of 1300 degrees fahrenheit so long as the pressure is high enough.

They say that theoretically there are 17 different phases of ice. I think I’ve seen all of them on my front sidewalk.

If one began enumerating present government boondoggles, there are so many and they are added so quickly I don’t think the list would ever be completed. And it is rare that one is ever eliminated. The National Helium Reserve was established in 1925 when dirigibles were operating in substantial numbers and it’s still going strong, having survived repeated attempts at putting it out of our misery. Of all of the government boondoggles, none is probably pragmatically worse or politically more expedient than the federal mandate for corn-based ethanol. Hank Campbell explains why at the American Council on Science and Health:

In the 1980s and ’90s, environmentalists touted ethanol as ideal renewable energy because it’s made from corn, which can obviously be regrown each year. They claimed it was equivalent in efficiency to gasoline and therefore superior to fossil fuels. The political and financial push for ethanol by greens was so strong that Vice President Al Gore broke a 1994 tie in the Senate to force an Environmental Protection Agency ethanol mandate as part of the Clinton administration’s Clean Air Act.

But there is nothing clean about it. It is energy and cost intensive to turn corn into fuel, which is why it cannot survive without government mandates and subsidies. Though 1994 made ethanol a reality for environmentalists, it was the Renewable Fuel Standard of 2005, by President George W. Bush and a Republican Congress, that really kicked the industry into high gear. The Renewable Fuel Standard gave EPA the authority to create quotas for ethanol. which forced its use even though it is less efficient than pure gasoline and results in lower miles per gallon. In 1993, before Vice President Gore allowed EPA to mandate ethanol, it account for less than one-tenth of 1 percent of fuel. It’s now 10 percent. President Barack Obama also did the environment no favors by turning over 5 million acres of land designated for conservation over to corn farmers to promote ethanol as “green” energy during his time in office, with another million acres of farmland that switched to corn because the profits were guaranteed by taxpayers.

Ethanol does not pass any standard for evidence-based policymaking and the Trump administration should end 24 years of government wishful thinking by his predecessors rather than increasing its use.

In all likelihood the Trump Administration will expand the ethanol subsidy rather than eliminating it. There are some subidies that are too big to be allowed to fail.

If HR676 is any model for what House Democrats mean by “Medicare for All”, supporters of M4A should probably be careful of what they wish for. It isn’t Medicare for all. It isn’t much like the Canadian plan or the British plan or any of the Continental European plans that are praised so regularly by proponents of healthcare reform. It’s not like the Canadian system because that system is implemented by the provinces. It’s not like the British plan because practitioners wouldn’t be employed by the government. It’s not like any of the other plans because it renders private insurance covering anything the plan would deem medically necessary illegal.

Over at the BBC there’s an interesting article on a IPCC report proposing “cheap ways to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and others have all stated that extracting CO2 from the air will be needed if we are to bend the rising temperature curve before the end of this century.

These ideas are controversial with some seeing them as a distraction from the pressing business of limiting emissions of CO2.

But a new assessment from the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine says that some of these “negative emissions technologies” are ready to be deployed, on a large scale, right now.

The authors point to the fact that the US Congress has recently passed the 45Q tax rule, which gives a $50 tax credit for every tonne of CO2 that’s captured and stored. So their study highlights some technologies that are available at between $20 and $100 per tonne.

Among the proposals are:

• Increasing the amount of carbon stored in shoreline marshes
• Planting trees
• Forest management
• Changing agricultural practices
• Biomass energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS)

and not one of those proposals is draconian. As noted above there are people who oppose anything that isn’t draconian:

The report acknowledges that there is a significant “moral hazard” here.

“If you present the siren song of negative emissions, does it decrease humanity’s will to invest in the mitigation that’s needed to reduce emissions – this a concern we’ve discussed in every meeting,” said Prof Pacala.

What I think that people who oppose such measures are missing is that China and India will continue to use fossil fuels in increasing amount and there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it. Except not buy from China which, apparently, we’re not willing to do.

We’ve got about ten days until the 2018 midterm elections and I’d like to make a few predictions and elicit some from my commenters.

The Democrats will pick up a few governor’s mansions but Republicans will continue to hold significantly more.

I think that Republicans are likely to pick up a few seats in the Senate.

I don’t believe the battle for the House is quite what you may have heard. There are 435 seats in the House and all are of the seats are being voted on. Incumbents are running for re-election to about 370 of those seats and they will overwhelmingly be re-elected. Many are uncontested, effectively if not formally. Here in the Illinois 5th District, for example, although I know that Mike Quigley has a Republican running against him I haven’t seen any ads on television for either Quigley or his opponent and I haven’t received any mail adverts from the Republican candidate. I suspect that most of the people in the district aren’t even aware that a Republican is running against Quigley. That’s opposition in name only.

A few incumbents may be defeated for re-election but overwhelmingly they will be returned to office. That’s true of Democrats and Republicans alike.

The battleground is over the sixty some-odd seats. Some of those elections will turn on party affiliation and in most of the rest the better candidate will win. The degree to which the battle for the House is a referendum on Trump is greatly exaggerated.

When the dust has settled I think the Democrats will hold the House by a very narrow majority, considerably smaller than the Republicans’ present House majority. A lot less will actually have happened than you might have been led to believe.

There are a few things that could upset that calculation. It’s possible, just barely possibly in my estimation, that people are lying to pollsters to an unexpected degree, the election is in fact a referendum on Trump, and Trump is a lot more popular than the New York Times, Washington Post, and other major media outlets would lead you to believe. If that’s the case Republicans could actually pick up seats in the House. I’m skeptical but it could happen.

Maybe the Democrats will be able to make hay out of the archetypal Florida Man who sent a bunch of pipebombs through the mail to various nationally prominent Democrats. Unless Republicans make the mistake of keeping that idiotic whackjob in the news, it’s likely he will be forgotten by Tuesday. If he remains a topic, Democrats could pick up a few additional seats.

I think the Democrats are underestimating the significance of the caravan of asylum/job seekers making its way north through Mexico. If that caravan is in the tens of thousands and massing on the border on election day, it could swing some races towards the Republican candidates.

Some revelation in domestic politics could swing the vote one way or another. International events tend to promote a “rally ’round” effect that would help the Republicans. With Trump you just never can tell.

What do you think the outcome of the midterm elections will be?

Good advice: don’t use blowtorches to kill spiders. From Gizmodo:

While this should seemingly go without saying, it turns out that “kill it with fire” is not a great idea when it comes to ridding your home of pests. Nonetheless, there is no shortage of failed cases of people attempting to kill spiders or insects with blowtorches, and it doesn’t often end well.

In what appears to be yet another example of such an incident failing spectacularly, a man house-sitting for his parents at their Fresno, California residence may have set their house on fire after attempting to kill some black widow spiders on an exterior wall of the home, though investigators are still looking into the cause of the fire. The incident occurred Tuesday in the Woodward Lake housing development and resulted in fire damage to the home’s second story and attic, according to ABC-affiliate KFSN.

Reporter Christina Fan of KFSN was on the scene at the fire and streamed her coverage in a Facebook Live video later shared to the Fresno Fire Department’s Facebook page. Calling the incident “one of the most bizarre fire stories I have heard,” she added:

He told firefighters that there were a lot of black widow spiders that were outside the home on the exterior wall. So he decided that he was going to try to exterminate these spiders with a blowtorch. They’re still looking into the cause; but it’s pretty clear, investigators say, that was likely the cause of this fire.

According to Fan, the incident was a two-alarm fire, and 29 firefighters reported to the scene. No one was injured, but as you can imagine, the firefighters didn’t seem too impressed with the man’s botched attempt at spider fire-murder.

Footnote: pointing out how bad an idea killing spiders with blowtorches neither denies the existence of spiders nor asserts that they’re all benign (although most are).