artdiamondblog.com – Page 51 – Art Diamond's web log

California Regs Requiring Electric Trucks at Ports, Raise Supply Chain Costs, Fueling Inflation for Consumers

(p. B1) Neri Diaz thought he was ready for a crucial juncture in California’s ambitious plans, closely watched in other states and around the world, to phase out diesel-powered trucks.

His company, Harbor Pride Logistics, acquired 14 electric trucks this year to work alongside 32 diesel vehicles, in anticipation of a rule that says diesel rigs can no longer be added to the list of vehicles approved to move goods in and out of California’s ports. But in August the manufacturer of Mr. Diaz’s electric vehicles, Nikola, took back the trucks as part of a recall, saying it would return them in the first quarter of the new year.

“It’s a brand-new technology, first generation, so I knew things were going to happen, but I wasn’t expecting all my 14 trucks to be taken back,” he said. “It is a big impact on my operations.”

. . .

(p. B5) Large companies, with deep pockets and big facilities, are best positioned to make the green transition. Mike Gallagher, a California-based executive at Maersk, the Danish shipping giant, said the company had a fully electric fleet, comprising some 85 vehicles made by Volvo and BYD, the Chinese automaker, for transporting goods up to 50 miles out of the ports of Southern California. And it has worked with landlords to install scores of chargers at its depots.

“We’re well ahead of the curve,” he said.

But smaller trucking fleets do most of the port runs — accounting for some 70 percent at the Los Angeles port — and they are going to find the transition hard. The California Trucking Association has filed a federal lawsuit against the state’s trucking rules, including the one focused on port trucks, contending that they represent “a vast overreach that threatens the security and predictability of the nation’s goods movement industry.”

Matt Schrap, the chief executive of the Harbor Trucking Association, another trade group, said the port truck rules lacked exemptions that would help smaller businesses survive the transformation. Getting access to chargers is particularly difficult for smaller fleets, he said: They are expensive, and the truck yard landlords may be reluctant to install them, forcing the operators to rely on a public charging system that is only just getting built.

“The landlord is, like, ‘There’s not a snowball’s chance in Bakersfield that you’re going to tear up my parking lot to put in some heavy-duty charging,’” Mr. Schrap said.

Concern exists beyond the trade groups. Mr. Gallagher, the Maersk executive, said that if the clean truck rules caused serious problems for smaller operators, it could be “a significant disruption to the supply chain.”

. . .

Mr. Diaz, the operator whose Nikola trucks were recalled, said that charging the trucks cost roughly 40 percent less than diesel, and that he was impressed with their performance. Even with the help of state grants, he estimates that the electric trucks cost him as much as 50 percent more than diesel models. During the recall, Nikola has been covering the payments on the loans Mr. Diaz took out to buy the trucks, but he said he was concerned about the truck maker’s financial situation.

. . .

Rudy Diaz, president of Hight Logistics, said the new regulations had pushed up some of his costs as his company brought drivers onto its payroll and reduced its reliance on contract drivers using their own diesel trucks.

“It’s extra headaches, extra costs,” he said. “But consumers are asking for products that are more sustainable, and they’re willing to pay the price.”

For the full story, see:

Peter Eavis and Mark Abramson. “California Is Pushing E.V.s As the Future of Freight.” The New York Times (Saturday, December 30, 2023): B1 & B5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Dec. 29, 2023, and has the title “California Pushes Electric Trucks as the Future of Freight.”)

Cancel Culture Makes It Tougher to Be “Intellectually Interesting”

(p. B6) John Cleese is “not bothered about getting cancelled.”

. . . while he is too “old” and established to worry about it, he admitted if he was just starting his career he’d be more hesitant about his writing.

. . .

“Cancel culture tends to make people less broad in their thinking, more literal-minded. It is tougher to make funny — or intellectually interesting — associations.

When The Life of Brian was released in 1979, the Monty Python troupe faced calls for it to be banned or censored, and John, 84, thinks they were “early targets” of cancel culture.

For the full story, see:

Bang Showbiz. “Cleese ‘Too Old’ to Worry about Being Canceled.” Omaha World-Herald (Thursday, Nov. 2, 2023): B6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

Planners of Megaprojects Almost Always Over-Promise and Under-Deliver

(p. B5) Bent Flyvbjerg is an expert in the planning and management of “megaprojects,” his name for huge efforts that require at least $1 billion of investment: bridges, tunnels, office towers, airports, telescopes and even the Olympics. He’s spent decades wrapping his mind around the many ways megaprojects go wrong and the few ways to get them right, and he summarizes what he’s learned from his research and real-world experience in a new book called “How Big Things Get Done.”

Spoiler alert! Big things get done very badly.

They cost too much. They take too long. They fall too short of expectations too often. This is what Dr. Flyvbjerg calls the Iron Law of Megaprojects: “over budget, over time, under benefits, over and over again.”

The Iron Law of Megaprojects might sound familiar to anyone who has survived a home renovation. But when Dr. Flyvbjerg dug into the numbers, the financial overruns and time delays were more common than he expected. And worse. Much worse.

His seminal work on big projects can be distilled into three pitiful numbers:

• 47.9% are delivered on budget.

• 8.5% are delivered on budget and on time.

• 0.5% are delivered on budget, on time and with the projected benefits.

. . .

Humans are optimistic by nature and underestimate how long it takes to complete future tasks. It doesn’t seem to matter how many times we fall prey to this cognitive bias known as the planning fallacy. We can always ignore our previous mishaps and delude ourselves into believing this time will be different. We’re also subject to the power dynamics and competitive forces that complicate reality, since megaprojects don’t take place in controlled environments, and they are plagued by politics as much as psychology. Take funding, for example. “How do you get funding?” he said. “By making it look good on paper. You underestimate the cost so it looks cheaper, and you underestimate the schedule so it looks like you can do it faster.”

For the full review, see:

Ben Cohen. “SCIENCE OF SUCCESS; 99% of Big Projects Fail. Lego Is the Fix.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, February 4, 2023): B5.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date February 2, 2023, and has the title “SCIENCE OF SUCCESS; 99% of Big Projects Fail. His Fix Starts With Legos.”)

The book under review is:

Flyvbjerg, Bent, and Dan Gardner. How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything in Between. New York: Currency, 2023.

Disabled Civil Rights Leader Removed from Audience of “The Color Purple” Because the Chair He Brought Fails to Comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act

Presumably the Reverend William J. Barber II knows what chair designs reduce the chronic pain he feels from the ankylosing spondylitis he has endured “for almost 40 years.” He has what Hayek called “local knowledge” that is not possessed by the government legislators and enforcers of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Regulations keep individuals from using their local knowledge, with results that can be outrageously unfair.

(p. A15) AMC Theaters has apologized to the Rev. William J. Barber II, a civil rights leader, after he was escorted from a Greenville, N.C., theater after employees refused to allow him to use a chair he needs to manage a painful medical condition, he said.

Mr. Barber, 60, was attending a Tuesday afternoon screening of “The Color Purple” with his mother, Eleanor Barber, 90. He said he tried to use the chair, which an assistant carried for him, by placing it in an area reserved for handicapped seating, saying he had done so before in theaters, at Broadway plays and even on a visit to the White House.

He said a theater employee told him that he would not be able to use the chair, which looks like a small stool, because it did not comply with guidelines in the Americans with Disabilities Act.

. . .

Mr. Barber has a condition called ankylosing spondylitis, and walks slowly with the aid of a cane. He said the disease attacks his joints “like a guided missile” and has forced him to live with chronic pain for almost 40 years. “I describe it like that because it’s a war to live with it,” he said.

He added that people with disabilities often fight invisible battles that can be difficult for people not living with disabilities to understand.

For the full story, see:

Clyde McGrady. “Rights Leader Gets Apology For Removal From Theater.” The New York Times (Saturday, December 30, 2023): A15.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Dec. 28, 2023, and has the title “AMC Theaters Apologizes to Civil Rights Leader Removed From Movie Theater.”)

As Freedom Left Hong Kong, So Did Hundreds of Billions of Dollars and 100,000 Citizens

(p. B1) This summer, when Hong Kong’s stock market rout seemed to have no end in sight, the city’s financial chief, Paul Chan, jumped into action, creating a task force to inject confidence into a market that was being pummeled by global investors wary of China.

Hong Kong cut taxes on trading, and Mr. Chan went on a roadshow to Europe and the United States, promising measures to “let investors feel optimistic about the outlook.” Investors were anything but sanguine, however, and the city’s stock exchange is among the world’s worst-performing stock markets this year.

. . .

Hundreds of billions of dollars flowed out this year as money managers and pension funds reduced their holdings in Hong Kong, which has long been a gateway for foreign investors wanting to put money into mainland China. The outflows were largely driven by an economic downturn in China and mounting pressure on American investors to sell their (p. B3) exposure to Chinese companies.

. . .

A former British colony, Hong Kong was handed back to China in 1997 with a pledge that it would maintain a high degree of self-governance under a policy called “one country, two systems.” For two decades, this allowed Hong Kong to define itself as unique and distinct from the rest of China, while offering financial access to the world’s second largest economy.

But after citywide protests in 2019, Beijing imposed the national security law, which has silenced political debate and stifled civic activity.

More than 100,000 residents have left Hong Kong over the last few years, in part because of the security law and tough pandemic restrictions. Many young Hong Kong professionals who are still there have expressed a desire to leave, making it a challenge to recruit the talent that has helped the city function as a financial center.

Once a major hub for Wall Street banks, Hong Kong had a drought of initial public offerings this year. Companies raised the lowest amount of money since 2001, resulting in layoffs at financial institutions citywide.

Many international companies have stopped hiring for new positions in Hong Kong. With less money coming into the exchange and fewer transactions, dozens of brokerages have also closed.

For the full story, see:

Alexandra Stevenson. “Hong Kong Stock Market Ends in Loss For 4th Year.” The New York Times (Saturday, December 30, 2023): B1 & B3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Dec. 29, 2023, and has the title “Hong Kong Stocks Plunge to Losses for 4th Straight Year.”)

“To Save the World”

(p. A21) The task of improving the world may seem impossible, but it isn’t. All it takes is the proper sequence of correct discrete decisions. Decisions are just resolutions with teeth.

An editor of mine told me a story from his childhood on his grandparents’ farm in Iowa. The little boy, looking out over acres and acres of corn, asked his grandfather, “How are we going to shuck all that corn?” His grandfather said, “One row at a time.”

. . .

At an event a couple of months ago, someone asked me why I wrote something the way I did, and I found myself blurting out, “To save the world.” It was laughable, preposterous and true.

For the full commentary, see:

Roger Rosenblatt. “Resolve About Something Bigger Than Yourself.” The New York Times (Saturday, December 30, 2023): A21.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Dec. 26, 2023, and has the title “This Year, Make a Resolution About Something Bigger Than Yourself.”)

Tom Watson, Jr. Managed IBM’s Rare and Successful Self-Disruption by “Transitioning the Firm to Electronic Computing”

(p. 9) Thomas J. Watson Jr. seemed, from a young age, to be destined for failure.

. . .

“He played with fire, shot animals in the nearby swamps and pilfered things from neighbors’ houses,” Ralph Watson McElvenny and Marc Wortman write in “The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived,” a compelling new biography of Watson Jr.

. . .

This is far from the first book about IBM.

. . .

But this is probably the most theatrical book about IBM ever published. McElvenny, who happens to be Watson Jr.’s eldest grandson, is privy to “personal and corporate papers” and, as the endnotes mysteriously specify, many “family sources.”

. . .

“The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived” is about the challenges of corporate and family succession, an essential topic given that IBM itself was the father figure to most of the computing and tech industry. Watson Sr., “the old man,” was a type familiar to our times: the tech titan who runs a large company as an extension of himself. (The IBM machine that beat the “Jeopardy!” champion Ken Jennings bears his name.) For four decades, IBM was Watson Sr.’s fief. The company “was run entirely out of one man’s breast pocket,” McElvenny and Wortman write. Watson Sr. “made all strategic decisions and most minor ones” and “delegated almost no authority.”

To his lasting credit, he did truly take care of his employees and their families in a manner that bred a strong loyalty. That said, Watson Sr. demanded conformity and could be erratic and cruel.

. . .

IBM faced a classic version of what the Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has termed the “innovator’s dilemma” and what the Nobel Prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow described as a monopoly’s disinclination to innovate. IBM was making plenty of profit on punched cards and accounting machines, its customers were happy, so why rock the boat?

Watson Jr.’s intense antipathy toward his father ended up saving IBM. Just before the United States entered World War II, Junior gained self-confidence the old-fashioned way: by joining the Army Air Corps and flying a B-24. When he eventually returned to IBM (pushed to do so by his commanding officer, Maj. Gen. Follett Bradley, who thought Watson would be wasted as an airline pilot), he became the internal champion of transitioning the firm to electronic computing. He was perhaps the only person who could oppose his father in a company built on yes men.

While the book’s title calls him “the greatest capitalist,” it might more accurately, if less ringingly, call him “the greatest manager,” for Watson Jr. was much better at delegating and using his employees’ talents.

For the full review, see:

Tim Wu. “Next-Gen.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, December 17, 2023): 9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated Dec. 15, 2023, and has the title “The Father-Son Struggle That Helped Ensure IBM’s Success.”)

The book under review is:

McElvenny, Ralph Watson, and Marc Wortman. The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived: Tom Watson Jr. and the Epic Story of How IBM Created the Digital Age. New York: PublicAffairs, 2023.

Alleged Upper Bounds to Lifespans Continue to Be Surpassed

(p. A2) In a 2002 paper, “Broken Limits to Life Expectancy” the demographers Jim Oeppen and James Vaupel showed that for nearly 100 years, estimates of when life expectancy would hit its limit were proven wrong, often in just a few years. In 2020, Max Roser of the University of Oxford noted that this trend was still intact.

There is no guarantee, of course, that this trend will continue over time or everywhere. Perhaps pandemics, weather disasters or fentanyl deaths will become widespread enough to outweigh improvements in cancer treatment and so on. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

The better bet, according to demographers, is that children born this year will live longer than children born in any previous year.

For the full commentary, see:

Josh Zumbrun. “THE NUMBERS; The Good News About Life Expectancy.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, December 16, 2023): A2.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date December 15, 2023, and has the title “THE NUMBERS; The (Surprisingly) Good News on Life Expectancy: It’s Still Going Up.”)

The Oeppen and Vaupel article mentioned above is:

Oeppen, Jim, and James W. Vaupel. “Broken Limits to Life Expectancy.” Science 296, no. 5570 (May 10, 2002): 1029-31.

The 2020 article by Roser, updating the Oeppen and Vaupel paper, is:

Roser, Max. “The Rise of Maximum Life Expectancy: Predictions of a Maximum Limit of Life Expectancy Have Been Broken Again and Again.” Last updated March 1, 2020 [cited Sat., Dec. 16, 2023]. Available from https://ourworldindata.org/the-rise-of-maximum-life-expectancy.

“Bow Only to the Truth”

(p. A19) Jiang Ping, a legal scholar who helped lay the foundation for China’s civil code, and whose experiences with political persecution shaped his relentless advocacy for individual rights in the face of state power, died on Dec. 19 [2023] in Beijing.

. . .

Often called “the conscience of China’s legal world,” Mr. Jiang established himself in the 1980s as a highly regarded teacher and a leading scholar, one of four professors who helped oversee the drafting of China’s first civil rights framework. His reputation was cemented during the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, when as university president he publicly supported the student protesters.

After the government quashed the protests and massacred the protesters, Mr. Jiang was removed from the university presidency. But he remained wildly popular on campus. Even after his removal, law students wore T-shirts printed with one of his best-known refrains: “Bow only to the truth.”

. . .

His moral authority was augmented by his own story. In the 1950s, as a young teacher, he was denounced as anti-Communist after criticizing excessive top-down bureaucracy and ordered to be “reformed,” as the government called it, through labor. He was not allowed to teach law for two decades. And, while working, he was hit by a train, leaving him with a prosthetic leg.

. . .

He lamented the lost decades, but he was never bitter. “Adversity gave me the ability to meditate and look back, and see things calmly,” he said at a celebration of his 70th birthday. “There was nothing to believe in blindly anymore.”

Mr. Jiang rose quickly after his political rehabilitation. He oversaw the drafting not only of civil and commercial laws, but also of China’s first administrative litigation law, which gave citizens a limited right to sue official agencies for misconduct.

In 1988, he was named president of the university. The next spring, protests broke out on Tiananmen Square. Mr. Jiang, fearing bloodshed, sat on the ground at the campus gate despite his bad leg and pleaded with students not to go.

When the students went, Mr. Jiang lent his support. Along with nine other university presidents, he signed an open letter urging the government to open a dialogue with the students.

After his ouster in 1990, Mr. Jiang stayed on as a professor.

For the full obituary, see:

Vivian Wang and Joy Dong. “Jiang Ping, 92, Called ‘Conscience’ Of China’s Legal World, Is Dead.” The New York Times (Saturday, December 30, 2023): A19.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated Dec. 29, 2023, and has the title “Jiang Ping, the ‘Conscience of China’s Legal World,’ Dies at 92.”)

Intel Was a Feared Monopoly but Now “Is in a Fight for Its Life”

(p. B3) It might not look like it yet, but Intel is in a fight for its life.

. . .

The threats to Intel are so numerous that it’s worth summing them up: The Mac and Google’s Chromebooks are already eating the market share of Windows-based, Intel-powered devices. As for Windows-based devices, all signs point to their increasingly being based on non-Intel processors. Finally, Windows is likely to run on the cloud in the future, where it will also run on non-Intel chips.

. . .

It wasn’t always this way. For decades, Intel enjoyed PC market dominance with its ride-or-die partner, Microsoft, through their “Wintel” duopoly.

. . .

I asked Dan Rogers, vice president of silicon performance at Intel, if all of this is keeping him up at night. He declined to comment on Intel’s past, but he did say that since Pat Gelsinger, who had spent the first 30 years of his career at Intel, returned to the company as CEO in 2021, “I believe we are unleashed and focused, and our drive in the PC has in a way never been more intense.”

. . .

Geopolitical factors, for one, have the potential to change the entire chip industry virtually overnight. Intel could suddenly become the only game in town for the most advanced kind of chip manufacturing, if American tech companies lose access to TSMC’s factories on account of China’s aggression toward Taiwan, says Patrick Moorhead, a former executive at Intel competitor AMD, and now head of tech analyst firm Moor Insights & Strategy.

When it comes to Intel, he adds, “Never count these guys out.”

For the full commentary, see:

Christopher Mims. “KEYWORDS; Is This the End of ‘Intel Inside’? Not If Intel Has Anything to Say About It.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Dec. 2, 2023): B13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date December 1, 2023, and has the title “KEYWORDS: CHRISTOPHER MIMS; Is This the End of ‘Intel Inside’?”)

“We Don’t Talk Anymore About Freedom”

(p. 25) “Gorbachev will pay for his sins! I can’t stand the sight of his pig’s mug!” On a winter day early in 2001, Grigori Romanov, once the party boss of Leningrad and an odds-on favorite to take over the Kremlin, stood on a Moscow sidewalk ranting to me, a Moscow correspondent for Time magazine, about Mikhail Gorbachev.

In the spring of 1985, Romanov had famously lost his shot at the government’s top post to the prematurely balding apparatchik from Russia’s south. It was Gorbachev — “a peasant who had no right coming to the big city,” Romanov all but shouted at me — who “started this disaster.”

. . .

. . . it’s only fitting that in “The Picnic,” Matthew Longo, an American political scientist who teaches in the Netherlands, revisits in captivating detail the actions of ordinary people during that heady summer of 1989, when the Iron Curtain cracked and a magical word — “freedom” — swept across the Eastern bloc. Within two years, the Soviet empire was over.

. . .

Longo sets himself a tight focus: the “Pan-European Picnic,” a stunt of political theater — organized by “budding” oppositionists (including the future prime minister of Hungary Viktor Orban, then a 26-year-old “with wild black hair and fire in his eyes”) and encouraged by a few reform-minded Communist higher-ups — that turned into political action. The picnic, a “giant, open-air party” convened on Aug. 19, 1989, and attended by hundreds, surprised all by forcing open the barbed-wire border between Austria and Hungary.

Blending oral history and political theory (including cameos by Plato and Isaiah Berlin), Longo recounts the drama in a vivid, fast-paced narrative. . . . . . ., Longo’s argument rings clear: “Sometimes the most important moments in history are forged by ordinary people.”

For Longo, the picnic was a revolutionary moment, bringing not only euphoria but an estimated 600 East Germans (in Hungary on “vacation”) across the border. “The scene was utter chaos,” Longo writes. “East Germans celebrating on the other side of the line; Hungarian officers in heated conversations; Austrians walking into Hungary, Hungarians crossing into Austria.” Three months later, the Berlin Wall fell. And in August 1991 — on the second anniversary of the picnic — a crew of revanchist putschists failed miserably in Moscow, speeding the demise of the Soviet Union.

. . .

“We don’t talk anymore about freedom like we did in 1989,” Longo writes, “freedom for collectivities, continents even; freedom for people fleeing oppression, wherever it is they were coming from.” He is right.

. . .

“All nations should have the opportunity for freedom,” Gorbachev said in one of his final interviews. This may sound like wishful thinking. But it happened to be the foolhardy belief that animated the ordinary heroes of Longo’s tale, both those who acted (politicians and civilians) and, just as vitally, those who did not (border guards and party lifers, who owed all they had ever known to the status quo), as well as, not least, the “peasant” who rose to the Kremlin.