Labor Day

On this day:
1864
American Civil War: Confederate General John Bell Hood evacuates Atlanta, Georgia after a four-month siege by General Sherman
1923
The Great Kantō earthquake devastates Tokyo and Yokohama, killing about 105,000 people.
1939
Adolf Hitler signs an order to begin the systematic euthanasia of mentally ill and disabled people
1939
World War II: Nazi Germany and Slovakia invade Poland, beginning World War II.
1972
In Reykjavík, Iceland, American Bobby Fischer beats Russian Boris Spassky to become the world chess champion.
1983
Cold War: Korean Air Flight 007 is shot down by a Soviet Union jet fighter when the commercial aircraft enters Soviet airspace. All 269 on board die, including Congressman Lawrence McDonald.
1985
A joint American–French expedition locates the wreckage of the RMS Titanic.
2004
Beslan school hostage crisis commences when armed terrorists take children and adults hostage in Beslan in North Ossetia, Russia.

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The Trump administration is drawing up plans to rebrand the Department of Defense as the Department of War, according to a White House official, following up on the president’s push to revive a name last used in 1947.

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AI fiction authorship has created a strange, obtuse, intelligent-sounding gibberish. 

If AI learns from us, what does that mean?

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Populist or far-right parties are leading the polls in the U.K., France, and Germany simultaneously.

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Under President Trump, the government has become a minority owner of Intel and will take a cut of Nvidia’s and Advanced Micro Devices’ sales of artificial-intelligence chips to China. This might sound like Chinese-style state capitalism, not classic U.S. free enterprise. However, government investment in companies is as American as apple pie and was common in the 19th century, Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Zweig writes. Unfortunately, history suggests the likely results will be massive misallocation of capital and a surge in waste, corruption, and conflicts of interest. --wsj

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India is meeting with China, China is meeting with Russia. We are meeting with ourselves. 

Now, if Russia would just give China some of that eastern land...

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Florida State true freshman linebacker Ethan Pritchard was injured and subsequently hospitalized following a shooting incident in Havana, Florida, on Sunday evening.

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The navigation system of a plane carrying Ursula von der Leyen was disrupted due to suspected Russian interference, the European Commission said.
A spokesperson said the "GPS jamming" happened while the Commission president was about to arrive in southern Bulgaria on Sunday, but she still landed safely.

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Labor Day


A Labor Day parable I stole off a blog:

A guy looked at my Porsche the other day and said I wonder how many people could have been fed for the money that sports car costs. I replied I am not sure, it fed a lot of families in Bowling Green, Kentucky who built it, it fed the people who make the tires, it fed the people who made the components that went into it, it fed the people in the copper mine who mined the copper for the wires, it fed people in Decatur IL, at Caterpillar who make the trucks that haul the copper ore. It fed the trucking people who hauled it from the plant to the dealer and fed the people working at the dealership and their families. BUT,… I have to admit, I guess I really don’t know how many people it fed.

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Another thought on labor for Labor Day.

"Growing cotton, further, unlike sugar or rice, never required slavery. By 1870, freedmen and whites produced as much cotton as the South produced in the slave time of 1860. Cotton was not a slave crop in India or in southwest China, where it was grown in bulk anciently. And many whites in the South grew it, too, before the war and after. That slaves produced cotton does not imply that they were essential or causal in the production.

Economists have been thinking about such issues for half a century. You wouldn’t know it from the King Cottoners. They assert, for example, that a slave was “cheap labor.” Mistaken again. After all, slaves ate, and they didn’t produce until they grew up. Stanley Engerman and the late Nobel Prize winner Robert Fogel confirmed in 1974 what economic common sense would suggest: that productivity was incorporated into the market price of a slave. It’s how any capital market works. If you bought a slave, you faced the cost of alternative uses of the capital. No supernormal profits accrued from the purchase. Slave labor was not a free lunch. The wealth was not piled up.
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We need to stop using the history of slavery to bolster anti-capitalist ideology. Ingenuity, not exploitation by slavery or imperialism or finance, is the story of the modern world."--McCloskey