Another Guy's Rant - part the first

Every now and again, one comes across a rant with lots more words than one's own on the same subject. One just bows in humility. It should come as no surprise that NoSQL is one of my pet peeves. Grant Fritchey goes the extra mile. Bless his heart.

I Remember Mama

These missives have mentioned my forays with the TI-990 mini in two of its forms back in the late 80s and early 90s. The signature characteristic of the machine was its (nearly) registerless design, using main memory for both 'registers' and 'memory'. The motivation for the design was that, at the time, memory speeds and cpu speeds were near enough that a greatly simplified cpu had a cost/benefit edge over conventional designs. Or so the TI engineers thought. Outside of a few verticals, the 990 didn't make much of a splash. Notably, none of the mainframe companies pursued the idea.

Well, may be a bit of that 990 magic could be back. We have this reporting on nanotube memory. It's non-volatile, fast, and dense. A registerless machine, with a single level of storage, makes abundant sense. We'll just have to see.

It's also notable that the company has been around for nearly two decades attempting to get the stuff made. As ARM, it doesn't manufacture. The founders are ex-Harvard, although the Big Cheese isn't a techy. Hmmm??

Thought For The Day - 21 August 2018

Today The Manchurian President now knows what it's like to be on the business end of a double barrel 8-gauge shotgun loaded with deer slugs. Yes, there are such, though not in current production.

Yes Ore No - part the second

There's a few line story in the news today. It seems Wilbur Ross will be braying at Century Aluminum in Kentucky on Wednesday; a smelter is re-opening idled lines. The Manchurian President wants credit. Recall the first entry in what is now a series: the USofA has little iron ore and virtually no bauxite (in global resource terms).

IF YOU DON'T HAVE STEEL, YOU DON'T HAVE A COUNTRY!
-- The Manchurian President/2018

Of course, that's pure nonsense. In the financialized economy of the 1%, national steel and aluminum are completely irrelevant.

Now, you can't have steel, or aluminum, without the source ores. It's not a case of 'where there's a will there's a way'. Yeah gotta have ore. And for aluminum, lots o electrons.

Alcoa, formerly the Aluminum Company of America, and another American company, Century Aluminum, have opened factories like this in Iceland, and closed factories in the United States, for a simple reason: Electricity is much cheaper here.
...
Bauxite may be mined and refined in Jamaica, shipped to northern Quebec for smelting, then hammered into car parts in Alcoa, Tenn.
[here]

Cheap electricity is what supports smelting aluminum; it requires prodigious amounts of leetle electrons to turn ore into metal. That Kentucky smelter exists because of the TVA.

In Washington state, for instance, the smelters that used to operate near the hydroelectric power plants along the Columbia River have been priced out by the power-chugging server farms of tech companies such as Microsoft.
[here]

and

Aluminum has been called "solid electricity" because of the amount used to make it (13,500 to 17,000 kWh per ton). That's why most of the aluminum smelters were built where the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Bonneville Power Authority could deliver cheap hydroelectric power.
[here]

So, a huge Pyrrhic victory for jingoism. Swell.

Thought For The Day - 17 August 2018

As if one needed yet more reporting on Turkey basting and the US Buck's supremacy. Not to mention all those trillions looking for hefty returns at low risk, we get some briefing.com words(7:55):

Looking at other markets, the Turkish lira is down 4.2% against the U.S. dollar this morning, on track to end its three-day rebound, but still remains a ways above its all-time low, which it hit on Monday. Meanwhile, U.S. Treasuries are higher, pushing yields into the red, with the benchmark 10-yr yield down two basis points at 2.85%.

Or, as we say (or so I'm told) in the Navy, "Dive motherfucker!! Dive!!!" Yeah, there's no advantage to being the world's reserve currency.

New Gold - Part the Sixth

The Manchurian President continues braying that the USofA is the victim of bad the international monetary and trade deals. Day after day. While these missives have explained why it is that the US Buck being the world's reserve currency actually gives us the royal flush in spades hand. The Manchurian President is either too stupid to figure that out, or he's just lying to cover his ass. Blame the global elites and their Democratic enablers. And so on.

Well, today brings yet more reporting that the USofA is gutting lots of the world.

A crumbling currency inflicts many damaging consequences: Companies that borrowed in dollars — the global reserve currency — have to come up with steadily more money in their local currencies to repay U.S. dollar debts. Having to do so also raises risks for the banks that lent to them.

That's the kind of squeeze that ignited the catastrophic 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis. A currency disaster in Thailand infected the entire region, and East Asian economies absorbed devastating damage.
[my emphasis]

We're the victims. Yeah, sure.

And, how might other countries manage this:

And emerging-market countries learned lessons from the debacle two decades ago. Many piled up reserves to fend off speculative assaults on their currencies. At the start of 1997, emerging-market countries' reserves amounted to barely 6 percent of their economic output. Now, they equal nearly 18 percent, according to the Institute of International Finance, a banking trade group.

Guess what?? All the US Buck reserves came from our current account trade deficit. No trade deficit, no expanding New Gold stock, no expanding world market, world market deflation. You don't want to live in that kind of world. Arithmetic doesn't lie. Yummy.

New Gold - Part the Fifth

Here we go again. There are upsides and downsides to the US Buck being the world's Reserve Currency, aka New Gold. One of the side-effects, in both directions, is on domestic interest rates. Many's the time these missives have called out the repercussions of rate inversion. Well, here's some more reporting on where we are.

It has been a long bull run for both stocks and bonds, and borrower defaults have been at historically low levels for years. As has the spread -- the difference between the yields -- of Treasury-backed securities and riskier bonds. But as interest rates continue to rise, and some companies and other borrowers fail to meet their debt obligations, defaults will inevitably increase along with the spreads.

The implication, of course, is that longer term private debt has been written at artificially low rates, and thus high prices. Again, there's nearly $2 trillion in idle money just on corporate balance sheets (see recent missives). Not to mention the 1% and .1%. All seeking 10% and no risk.

So, that reporting was a few days ago. Today we hear another siren, sounding in Turkey, of all places. Much the same as China over the last decade or so, lots of real estate building. As the saying goes, there's only so much time and so much land. You'll never get the former back once it's gone, and there's no more of the latter. Easy money in real estate.

Mr. Lee noticed that Turkish banks were borrowing in dollars to make other loans to fast-growing Turkish companies. He also saw that, over all, Turkey's economy was growing more reliant on financing from foreign investors. It struck him as similar to what had happened to Thailand in the years before the Asian financial crisis in 1997.

Gold giveth and gold taketh away. As with the Great Recession, lots of idle money, unable to find productive homes in physical capital, chases real estate.