Yesterday I was at Marion Bay, Tasmania ... site of one of the most haunting (and, unusually, non-violent) first contact episodes from the colonial era:
Abel Tasman's crew came ashore here on Dec. 1, 1642, the first anchorage they'd been able to find after struggling round the storm-racked south coast of the island.
They found evidence of people and what may have been Tasmanian tigers, but didn't *see* anyone in the open forest.
They saw a fireplace in a hollowed tree and climbing notches carved into a treetrunk to raid birds' eggs.
They concluded from the 5ft distance between the notches that the people must be giants.
They saw no one, but saw smoke from distant fires and heard the sound of a gong.
They saw geese and gulls and ducks, and found a type of samphire growing. That's still the case today.
They thought the land was "not cultivated, but growing naturally by the will of God", while unwittingly contradicting themselves by noting the land is "covered with trees standing so far apart that they allow a passage everywhere and a lookout to a great distance".
That open forest is the result of the fire agriculture they noticed sending billows of smoke into the air. These days, the bush is almost impenetrable.
There's nothing there to mark what happened. And ro be honest I don't know why I find this passage so haunting. There's a Marie Celeste quality to the fact that they didn't see anyone (but were, surely, seen). Even the Tasmanian tiger is present only as footprints and excrement.
There's no shortage of horrible first encounters from this era, and of course Tasmania's later history is among the most brutal of the colonial era. But there's an odd, fairy-tale quality to this passage that's stuck with me.
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A thing people really do not understand about US companies fretting about their per-car EV losses stories is that this is almost entirely a spurious issue about the unique way US accountants treat certain types of R&D spending. 🧵
I've long been a huge fan of @michaelxpettis and agree with him about most aspects of China's economy, but I think there's good evidence that clean tech, at least, is seeing solid, operationally-financed, productivity-enhancing growth right now. 🧵
A pretty common argument you hear these days to justify trade restrictions on Chinese EVs, solar panels, and batteries is that the industries are only prospering because of unfair subsidies. I don't think that's supported by the data:
The argument goes something like this: China is awash in easy money from state banks; its renewable manufacturers are undercutting overseas rivals; ergo, its comparative advantage isn’t scale, efficiencies or innovation, but the availability of cheap government cash.
Last September I made one of the scariest calls I've made as a columnist — a prediction that consumption of crude oil had already peaked, despite predictions that this was a decade or more in the future:
Well, much of the ocean floor is strewn with these potato-sized pebbles, which appear to form through complex processes over millions of years and are rich in manganese and other useful base metals.
From time to time, people have thought about mining these nodules. The most famous case was an extraordinary Cold War caper in the 1970s, when Howard Hughes set up a fake nodule mining company as cover for a CIA operation to salvage a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine.
I would like to suggest that the best explanation for this contradictory series of facts is that oil demand is in decline and every party is behaving rationally.
If you think oil demand is in fact rising then the entire global oil industry, with ~$3 trillion of annual revenues and ~$500 billion of annual capex, has taken a collective decision to just leave trillions of money on the table for ~reasons~
Today I want to tell a story about the con artists of cryptoland, and how they have a lot more in common with the founding fathers of modern capitalism that one might initially think (thread):
At this point it's pretty clear that cryptoland is in deep trouble. Sam Bankman-Fried can now add allegations of bribing Chinese officials to the string of accusations stemming from the collapse of crypto exchange FTX: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
His nemesis Changpeng Zhao is now facing a lawsuit against his rival Binance exchange from the CFTC: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…