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Protectionism “The Chinese Communist Party made a deliberate decision in the late 1990s to build the biggest steel industry in the world, even though China lacks most of the things you need to make steel—namely raw materials and affordable energy,” said Jim Darsey, executive vice president of Nucor Corporation—the biggest steelmaker in the United States—in a submission to the U.S. Congress. In 2015, the U.S. steel industry lost twelve thousand jobs. That year, facing massive overcapacity problems at home, China exported 112 million tons of steel, more than what was produced by the United States, Canada, and Mexico combined, a feat made all the more amazing given that ten years earlier, China was still a net importer of steel. “These imports aren’t coming here because the United States is an uncompetitive place to make steel. The opposite is true. We have plentiful raw materials, low-priced energy; and we have the most productive steel workers in the world,” said Darsey. “But we cannot compete with foreign governments who are willing to pour unlimited resources into growing an industry that does not have to yield any rate of return.” According to researchers Usha Haley and George Haley in their 2013 book, Subsidies to Chinese Industry, between 2000 and 2007, subsidies to China’s steel producers rose 3,800%, with the bulk coming through subsidized thermal coal, coking coal, and electricity. In 2007, energy subsidies to the steel industry alone came to $15.7 billion, about as much as Nucor generated in total sales. Something similar happened with paper, another industry mired in overcapacity. In 2008, China took over from the United States as the biggest papermaker in the world, producing paper products that are significantly cheaper than those produced in either the United States or the European Union. Yet China has few forests, and water—another important ingredient in making paper—is relatively scarce. Labor makes up only 4% of the cost of making paper. “In all these capital-intensive industries where labor costs play minor roles . . . in the space of approximately five years, China rose from a net importer to among the largest producers and exporters in the world,” the Haleys write in their book, which tracks Chinese subsidies to steel, paper, glass, and auto parts. The problem is not simply that China is able to dominate those industries it deems important. It’s that the policies that deliver dominance also create a huge amount of waste. “When the government chooses to support certain industries by imposing development policies . . . those industries all end up in overcapacity,” said Fan Gang, one of China’s most prominent economists. “Once we enter into these sorts of policies, each level of government then gives out its own subsidies, everyone in the market hustles, and in a short period it turns into an overcapacity industry.”
China's Great Wall of Debt
Dinny McMahon
but couldn't remember where he had put the formula. Pressed by Halley, Newton agreed to redo the calculations and produce a paper. He did as promised, but then did much more. He retired for two years of intensive reflection and scribbling, and at length produced his masterwork: the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica or Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, better known as the Principia. Once in a great while, a few times in history, a human mind produces an observation so acute and unexpected that people can't quite decide which is the more amazing—the fact or the thinking of it. Principia was one of those moments. It made Newton instantly famous. For the rest of his life he would be draped with plaudits and honors, becoming, among much else, the first person in Britain knighted for scientific achievement. Even the great German mathematician Gottfried von Leibniz, with whom Newton had a long, bitter fight over priority for the invention of the calculus, thought his contributions to mathematics equal to all the accumulated work that had preceded him. “Nearer the gods no mortal may approach,” wrote Halley in a sentiment that was endlessly echoed by his contemporaries and by many others since. Although the Principia has been called “one of the most inaccessible books ever written” (Newton intentionally made it difficult so that he wouldn't be pestered by mathematical “smatterers,” as he called them), it was a beacon to those who could follow it. It not only explained mathematically the orbits of heavenly bodies, but also identified the attractive force that got them moving in the first place—gravity. Suddenly every motion in the universe made sense. At Principia's heart were Newton's three laws of motion (which state, very baldly, that a thing moves in the direction in which it is pushed; that it will keep moving in a straight line until some other force acts to slow or deflect it; and that every action has an opposite and equal reaction) and his universal law of gravitation. This states that every object in the universe exerts a tug on every other. It may not seem like it, but as you sit here now you are pulling everything around you—walls, ceiling, lamp, pet cat—toward you with your own little (indeed, very little) gravitational field. And these things are also pulling on you. It was Newton who realized that the pull of any two objects is, to quote Feynman again, “proportional to the mass of each and varies inversely as the square of the distance between them.” Put another way, if you double the distance between two objects, the attraction between them becomes four times weaker. This can be expressed with the formula
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
The bending and extending motion of the wrist when shooting a basketball is called the wrist snap. In 1996, Roger Miller and Stuart Bartlett conducted the study Contributions to Ball Speed on a Free Throw. In this experiment, their subjects were 15- to 19-year-old boys. They analyzed the amount of force each body part contributed to a free throw. According to their study, 59% of the force to the ball came from the wrist snap.12 Contrary to popular belief, the arms and shoulders contributed more than the legs (81% upper body compared to 19% lower body). Your wrist snap should bring your control fingers to the center of the ball at release for a straight shot every time. It also should be natural. Why? Because it will increase your range. You will be generating more power with your wrist. A natural wrist snap puts your wrist in its strongest position. Furthermore, it will provide more consistency. A natural wrist snap is a universal trait among great shooters.
Straight Shooter
Bob Fisher
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