Volkswagen made over €54 billion in operating profit in China over the past 15 years. At its peak, over 40% of VW's profit came from China. Now China makes up 12%. As China's market becomes less important to German automakers, will this change Germany's relationship with China?

telling all my Bumble matches I’m a single issue voter and that issue is the Jones Act, a 100 year-old law that restricts shipping between United States ports to American-owned ships and costs us billions of dollars each year

Important and not said enough: "being too relentlessly critical, rather than constructive, tends to make people stupider." marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolu…

Hating the west as an ideological pillar is a dangerous pill to take, it leads one towards all sorts of bad places

R’s and D’s more often blame govt spending, debt & taxation for inflation and even D’s mostly don’t blame business. Harris may need to change minds about the cause of inflation to convince undecided voters on her econ policy. cc: NBER

The "Chromecore" Y2K subaesthetic (late 90s - mid 00s items pictured)

The tension between industrial policy goals of capacity, productivity, and cost is at loggerheads with the goal of more union jobs in the U.S. Steel debate. If we can’t prioritize and overcome interest groups, industrial policy is going to struggle wsj.com/business/u-s-s…

You see a lot of advocacy for a peptide called BPC-157 in the fitness community, but the paper trail looks thin. Yet here is a promising summary of preclinical from 1999, plus so many positive anecdotes these days, it seems like it should have provided plenty of basis for many

This isn’t about punishing success, and it won’t harm innovation, say the trustbusters as the US investigates NVidia for happening to have a valuable market niche during an AI boom.

This is the debate that is really far too absent. One side says there is no tradeoff, don't worry. The other side too often seems simply happy to be in the discussion at all. There is a serious conflict here!

I'm always interested in how controversial historians and political scientists (on the left and right) selectively wield the concept of agency. The easiest way to revise history is to assume highest agency for your villain and lowest agency for your anti-villain. So you get -

The guy people said was a bad guy but you liked anyway because he has the same enemies as you turns out to actually be a bad guy. Accept and move on

They make good cider, hope he got some.

Believing that making people mad proves your factual claims correct is the hallmark of a contrarian fool.

Strangely, a local news story that has gone unwritten thus far (AFAIK), but has anyone driven over to Follansbee, WV (40 miles away, you could bike there) over their 40 year history with Nippon Steel owning the local steel plant?

I'm all for being willing to incur economic costs to advance other objectives, like national security. But I'm less enthusiastic about incurring economic costs to weaken our national security by undermining US-based steel production & angering an ally. nytimes.com/2024/09/04/us/…