Coyote Blog

I am still thinking about how I can systematically engage with this administration without it becoming a full-time job.

So in the mean time, pinball restoration!  I moved everything to the new playfield and completed about 200+ solder joints.  I fired the thing up, with some trepidation, inserting one fuse, testing, and then another fuse, with the General Illumination fuse first and the solenoid fuse last.  After finding just a few shorts, and a few swapped wires, and one drop target where I reversed input and output on the sensors, everything is mostly working.  After these photos were taken I get the pop bumpers installed and a few other details like the coil that puts the ball in play.  Next up siderails and all the playfield details.  I still have not cleaned up the huge 7 drop target monstrosity that is really the core of the game.

I missed the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Japan and VJ day as I was busy with travel. 

Including long-term effects, perhaps 200,000 people were killed by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  This has led to 80 years of questions about whether the bombs should have been dropped.

Best Argument Against:

Nuclear weapons are a horrible weapon that had little or no military value were they were dropped in Japan.   Their sole role was mass killing civilians, something we and most nations considered a war crime until about 1940.  While the US was not the one to initially break taboos against terror bombing of civilians, we joined in enthusiastically given that strategic bombing fit so well with our technological and economic advantages, not to mention a national sense that bombing was a "cheaper" way to win a war, at least in terms of US casualties (a bias that has never really gone away).  For everything written below, I still think this argument dominates, though for reasons stated below it was an impossible position at the time.

Worst Argument For:

"The atomic bombs in Japan killed fewer people than the fire bombing of Tokyo."  This is a lame moral position, boiling down to "well, we did worse stuff."

Worst Argument Against:

A very common argument against the bombing was that the blockade of Japan was working and would have eventually strangled Japan and brought it to its knees.  This is likely true.  But starvation and related diseases were already killing as many as 50,000 or more a month, and likely higher.  Even with the sudden end of the war and the reopening of trade and some American food aid, there were hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilian deaths due to hunger and related diseases.  Opponents of the bomb frequently argue that the blockade alternative was more humane somehow, but 6 more months of Japanese holding out would likely have led to the deaths - slow, horrible deaths - of far more Japanese than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Contemporaneous Arguments For:

• I don't think modern audiences understand how tired Americans were of the war.  There was simply zero support for a decision to spare Japanese civilians in exchange for a longer war and more American death.
• There is an ongoing argument about how many American lives were saved by not having to follow through on the American invasions of Japan.  Personally I think we would have seen at least 10x the casualties suffered on tiny Okinawa, which would mean 500,000 American casualties invading Japan.  Opponents of dropping the bomb have argued, implausily I think, that the total would have been 100,000 or less than the death toll in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  But this is only American casualties.  In Okinawa the Japanese army and civilians died at a rate 5x that of American killed and wounded.  So even at the lower estimate of 100,000 US military dead the total human death toll would have been over a half million.
• The leadership of Japan was simply not going to budge and make peace on any sort of terms close to unconditional surrender.  Some said they were interested in a negotiated peace, but on terms the US would never have accepted (eg Japan holds on to Manchuria).  After the first bomb no one in the Japanese leadership changed their position.  After the second bomb almost no one changed their position -- only a shift by the Emperor and a few of those around him turned the tide, and even so there were last minute efforts to thwart peace among hardliners (up to and including attempts to steal the recordings of the Emperor's broadcast and take the Emperor into custody "for his own protection").
• There was likely some racism involved in the decision, but had the bomb been available we would probably have bombed the mayonnaise-white Germans given the opportunity.  Weird racist theories would pop up about the Japanese from time to time  -- eg that the shape of their eyes would affect their vision and thus make them poor pilots, a theory that got disproved pretty dramatically early in the war.  But Americans  never could understand the cultural norms that caused Japanese soldiers to fight to the last man, even when the fighting was pointless.  It looked to Americans like a death cult, and completely alien, and eliminated any small empathy that might have existed after 4 long years of war.

Ex Post Argument Against:

• The Russians were coming.  The Russians invaded Manchuria after the first bomb was dropped.  The bomb may have slightly accelerated their time table but not by much.  In line with their previous commitments at international conferences (and their own desire to grab some territory), they were preparing to invade in August of 1945 (3 months after the defeat of Germany) and had spent much of the summer moving troops across Siberia.  By this time the US, which had begged Russia to join the war with Japan in 1944, was starting to regret this decision.  The Russians were quickly and immensely successful, rolling through the Japanese forces like they did not exist.  They had plans to invade the island of Hokkaido within weeks.  This terrified Japanese hardliners -- who were strongly anti-communist -- as well as the US which was already coming to suspect that the Russians were not going to leave the Eastern European countries they had overrun.  We could have left the hard fighting for Japan to the Soviets, but we did not want the Soviets permanently ensconced in the Japanese Islands.  You can see this fear in some of the American actions -- in particular how fast the second bomb was dropped.  When the Russians invaded the whole time-table accelerated with the US racing to end the war with Japan before the Soviet steamroller took too much territory.  While leaving it to the Russians would have saved American lives and prevented the atomic bombings, it almost certainly would not have reduced total Japanese deaths and long-term suffering.

Ex Post Argument For:

• Nobody has dropped one since.  Counter-factuals are always hard, but personally I am convinced that if the bombs had not been dropped on Japan, some idiot would have dropped them somewhere else -- perhaps on a large Chinese city in the Korean War.  This is an awful argument to make, I admit, but perhaps only a demonstration of their horror changed attitudes about atomic bombs.

A few updates on Trump's continuing tariff saga:

RNG

I challenge any human being to decipher any sort of rational (even an irrational but consistent) algorithm behind Trump's tariffs.  Every day it is another random number superseding the prior random number.  It is economic policy by whim.

Cronyism

Today Trump slapped a 100% tariff (see RNG point above) on semiconductor imports.  It is difficult to comprehend a worse policy for the American economy had the President been dedicated to crashing things here on purpose.  Consistently he slaps huge tariffs on commodity manufacturing inputs (chips, steel, aluminum) that are critical for the high-value-added products that are made in this country.

But leave that aside, what particularly caught my eye is this:

Trump announced he would impose a 100% tariff on chip and semiconductor imports, but would exempt companies moving production back to the United States

Apple seems headed for the first exemption, which they also received in Trump's first term and his tariffs then.  Why Apple?  One could argue that Apple has some of the highest gross margins of any manufacturer in the US and is perhaps most able to bear the tariffs.  But this has nothing to do with fairness, it has to do with cronyism and political pull.  Say what you will about all of the companies one thinks of as political manipulators, but no one holds a candle to Apple.  They have used their size and clout and money to manipulate dozens of state and local governments all the way up to things like international tax law.  In this case, the are apparently going to get an exemption because of the "promise" to invest lots of money in US manufacturing:

With CEO Tim Cook standing next to him in the Oval Office as the president announced a fresh (and very laughable) $100 billion investment plan by Apple which it would then add to the $500 billion already pledged over the next 4 years (which is ridiculous since Apple spent $43 billion in capex in the past 4 years and generated less than $100 billion in net income in its best year)...

Apple had previously pledged to spend $500 billion in the US over the next four years, an acceleration over its prior investments and previously announced plans, adding about $39 billion in spending and an additional 1,000 jobs annually. The announcement will bring Apple’s cumulative commitment to $600 billion, and appears to be an ad hoc bundling of pretty much everything on the income and cash flow statements, including CoGS, SG&A, CapEx, buybacks and so on. The previously-planned $500 billion was said to include work on a new server manufacturing facility in Houston, a supplier academy in Michigan and additional spending with its existing suppliers in the country.

Why does this sound familiar?  Oh yes, because Foxconn made the exact same promise 8 years ago to build a huge plant in Wisconsin in exchange for dodging the Trump tariff hammer:

Initially, Foxconn was to build a Generation 10.5 facility that would manufacture large LCD screens. The project was to be an investment of up to $10 billion that would deliver up to 13,000 jobs.

The state legislature passed a $2.85 billion tax incentive package that required Foxconn to meet certain hiring and capital investment benchmarks during the next 10 years in order to receive the tax credits.

The company also received a $150 million break in sales taxes, bringing the total state package to $3 billion.

The village of Mount Pleasant and Racine County were put in charge of paying property owners for the land and upgrading the infrastructure.

How did this work out?  Basically they bailed and terminated most of the project once Trump was out of office.  Instead of 13,000 employees there were barely 1000 and less than a billion dollar was spent, a good portion of that government rather than private money.  Elon Musk did pretty much the same thing in New York, abandoning most all of his job creation and investment promises.

The same thing has happened all the time -- corporation grabs current government regulatory benefits in exchange for promises of investment sometime in the future.

Absolutely no one should take this sort of thing credulously.  This is a crony giveaway to a power corporation, and nothing else.  It is Apple getting preferred treatment in exchange for giving Trump a nice press release item.  I would be shocked if the final number is even 5% of these promises.

Premature Optimism

I see this sort of thing coming from a lot of (formerly) economics-rational Conservatives but it is really disappointing to see it from the WSJ news (not opinion) section:

Six months into the experiment, with more tariff announcements likely in the coming days, the economy hasn’t crashed. Inflation has ticked up but not soared. Consumers aren’t finding empty shelves.