📈 first Derivative [104]
🇯🇵 empire of the setting sun—👨👩👧👦 what we owe each other—🏠 home affordability —📱 app store battles
🪖 After I finished Band of Brothers and The Pacific, my friend Sam recommended I watch Generation Kill, an HBO show on the Iraq war. It’s based off a book based off a series of articles in Rolling Stone written by Evan Wright, a journalist who embedded with the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion of the Marine Corps as the invasion of Iraq began in 2003. I blitzed through the miniseries in a week and strongly recommend it. If there’s anything out there like this for Afghanistan, please let me know. I guess I was too young for it to land on my radar when it came out, but I think it ranks up there with BoB is better than The Pacific. It belongs with the other classic HBO series that are at least a bit before my time (Oz, Six Feet Under, Big Love, Deadwood) and are under-appreciated relative to shows like The Sopranos.
🪄🏔 After months and months, I finally finished The Magic Mountain which I regret subjecting my book club to. I didn’t hate the experience of reading it, but it is *long*, dense, and intentionally obscure. I’m two books shy of my Goodreads 2023 goal and I’m planning to round out the year with Cities of the Plain (finishing up the Border Trilogy I started in January with All the Pretty Horses) and then either Blood Meridian or a new book by a friend, Max Marshall, called Among the Bros, about a massive fraternity drug trafficking ring at the College of Charleston. I expect at least one of them will be a serious meditation on the sadistic violence endemic to gangs of American males on the receding frontiers of civilization.
Upcoming: year-end lists and predictions for next year. Trying to catch Fallen Leaves and American Fiction this weekend before drawing up my 2023 movie list but expect that soon.
Good reading,
—Teddy
🇯🇵🎖 Japan is struggling to man its military even as it rearms after a long period of pacifism
Japan is emerging from a long-standing period of post-WWII pacifism in response to growing security concerns over China and North Korea…
Japan has committed to raising military spending… by about 60 percent, over the next five years, which would give it the third-largest defense budget in the world. It is rapidly acquiring Tomahawk missiles and has spent about $30 million on ballistic missile defense systems…
The country has pacifism written into its Constitution, and, until recently, the public opposed the acquisition of missiles capable of striking enemy territory or legal changes that would allow Japanese troops, restricted by the Constitution to defense of the nation, to fight in some combat situations outside Japan. Now, as much of the population sees China as a threat to Japan’s security, polls show support for such measures.
but demographics are proving to be a challenge:
But as the population rapidly ages and shrinks — nearly a third of Japanese people are over 65, and births fell to a record low last year — experts worry that the military simply won’t be able to staff traditional fleets and squadrons.
The army, navy and air force have failed to reach recruitment targets for years, and the number of active personnel — about 247,000 — is nearly 10 percent lower than it was in 1990…
The demographic challenges pose economic ones, too: There is strong public resistance to tax increases to fund the defense budget at a time of rising social costs for older people.
👨👩👧👦 Cat Orman argues in Palladium that our shift toward a social paradigm of contract and consent has led to an anomie at the root of recent cultural trends
The last decade is defined by a shift away from a role ethic and towards a contractualist one. In a contractual moral framework, you have obligations only within relationships that you chose to participate in—meaning, to the children you chose to have and the person you chose to marry—and these can be revoked at any time. You owe nothing to the people in your life that you did not choose: nothing to your parents, your siblings, your extended family or friends, certainly nothing to your neighbors, schoolmates, or countrymen; at least nothing beyond the level of civility that you owe to a stranger on the street.
Contrasted to how traditional societies around the world have understood social relations:
Traditional societies held that we are born into our roles and responsibilities. You owed certain social and practical tributes to your neighbors, siblings, and countrymen, even though you didn’t sign up for them. Confucianism and stoicism made these systems of reciprocal obligations explicit in “role ethics.” Abrahamic religions treated one’s responsibility to the community as part of their obligation to God. Hinduism and the related traditions of the Indian subcontinent contain injunctions from dharma, the personal and social moral duties expected of every spiritually upright individual. While the roles and responsibilities differed greatly across time and place, all of these societies agreed on the necessity and even nobility of fulfilling unchosen roles and responsibilities.
As a consequence, doctrines of how to be a good person centered on the idea that we hold a positive duty of care to others, be it through tithing, caring for sick family members, or raising our neighbor’s barns on the frontier…
On the extreme demands this framework places on marriage:
But what about our willingness to embark on the project of marriage at all? The natural corollary to the contractual framework is that the only person you can feel entitled to support from is the person who signed up to be in your life: your romantic partner. When you can’t expect anything from the relationships you didn’t choose, the pressure on the one relationship you did choose becomes impossible to shoulder…
In imagining that one person can fulfill essentially our every, financial, logistical and spiritual need, in a moral world without friends, parents, or community, we have drawn up a job description for an impossible task. I suspect “polyamory,” the practice of maintaining committed relationships with multiple partners, increasingly common in the San Francisco Bay Area, is pointing at this same truth—one person can’t do everything. Many young people bounce from one ambiguous relationship to another and find it impossible to commit to a partner because they have a yawning void in their social lives that no one person could ever fill.
🏡📈 “It is now less affordable than any time in recent history to buy a home”
The median first-time buyer was 35 years old. That was the second-highest on record, behind only 2022’s peak of 36 years old…
The average monthly new mortgage payment is 52% higher in the U.S. than the average apartment rent… The premium is even sharper in many major metro areas—including 175% or more in Seattle and Austin, Texas, and several cities in California
📱⚖️ Fortnite-maker Epic Games won an antitrust case against Google, Epic v. Google, in which the jury found that:
Google has monopoly power in the Android app distribution markets and in-app billing services markets, that Google did anticompetitive things in those markets, and that Epic was injured by that behavior. They decided Google has an illegal tie between its Google Play app store and its Google Play Billing payment services, too, and that its distribution agreement, Project Hug deals with game developers, and deals with OEMs were all anticompetitive.
Ever wonder why you cant buy Kindle books on Amazon’s app or audiobooks on the Spotify app? Apple and Google, as the owners of the two dominant mobile operating systems, have used their platform power to take actions like ban third-party app stores and take a hefty cut of all purchases that happen on their platforms. Epic lost its case against Apple two years ago, but I’m curious to see if this will prove to be an early sign in the power struggle swinging away from the platform operators.
(Check out Ben Thompson at Stratechery for more thoughts.)