November 01 2024

1. AMERICA 2024: Migration Patterns Shift U.S. Political Landscape as America Sorts Itself into Warring Red and Blue Tribes
2. AMERICA 2024: The Gender-Education Political Divide Widens
3. AMERICA 2024: Transfer Payments From Federal Government Now Rival Investment Income
4. Tech Giants' AI Investments Start Paying Dividends
5. The Battle for Eurasia: North Korean Troops Aid Russia
November 1, 1946: First NBA game played

See the new Ad Astra Podcast! Released on Apple and Spotify around 10a CST.

1. AMERICA 2024: Migration Patterns Shift U.S. Political Landscape as America Sorts itself into Warring Red and Blue Tribes

In all but three states that voted for Mr. Biden in 2020, more Democrats have moved in than Republicans. The reverse is true for states Mr. Trump won — in all but one, more Republicans moved in. In 36 states, polarization happened in both directions at once: More newcomers were of the winning party, and more of those who left were of the losing party. Consider Florida: Once a critical swing state, it has become more reliably Republican. Out of the 3.5 million voters we tracked, more than 200,000 registered Republicans have moved in over the past four years, more than twice the number of Democrats. In Arizona, a state Mr. Biden won by less than 12,000 votes, incoming Republicans — a third of them from California — outnumbered incoming Democrats by a margin of three to two. Accounting for departures, Arizona gained about 17,000 Republican voters.  

These estimates, based on a New York Times analysis of detailed public voter registration records of more than 3.5 million Americans who moved since the last presidential election, offer a new and extraordinarily detailed glimpse into one of the ways that we segregate from each other — down to the street level.

Article Source: NYT

2. AMERICA 2024: The Gender-Education Political Divide Widens

In modern presidential politics, the gender gap has never been wider, but it gets particularly large when we break out gender by educational attainment. According to a recent poll by Pew research, the gender gap is 17 points, with Mr. Trump ahead 8 points among men and Ms. Harris up 9 points among women. The gap by education is 29 points, with Mr. Trump ahead 10 points among people without a college degree and Ms. Harris ahead 19 points among those with one. But broken up by gender and education, we see that the gaps are driven particularly by men without a college degree and women with a college degree, with an overall difference of 43 points. We are truly looking at two different Americas when we dig into the views of men without college degrees and women with college degrees. They are at opposite ends of the spectrum politically and experience essentially separate economies, and therefore give priority to distinct sets of character traits and issues.

Article Source: NYT

3. AMERICA 2024: Transfer Payments From Federal Government Now Rivals Investment Income

Payments from government entitlement programs — transfer payments — are the fastest-growing major component of citizens’ personal income. Such transfers are the third-largest source of personal income: In 2022, the average citizen received almost as much from government transfers ($11,500) as from investments ($12,900), and more than one-quarter as much money as was obtained from work. This average citizen received six times more (adjusted for inflation) in government transfer payments than in 1970, during which span income from other sources increased less than half as much. Transfers’ share of total (inflation-adjusted) personal income has more than doubled since 1970, from 8.2 percent to 17.6 percent in 2022. The Washington-based Economic Innovation Group, which promotes economic dynamism, has released a report, “The Great ‘Transfer’-mation,” explaining how swiftly U.S. communities became dependent on government transfer payments. In 2022, Americans received $3.8 trillion in government transfers, 18 percent of all personal income. In 1970, not even 1 percent of counties received one-quarter or more of personal income from transfers. By 2000, 10 percent did; in 2022, it was 53 percent. This is certain to increase as the population ages. The primary explanation: the aging U.S. population. The portion of the population age 65 and older has increased from 9.8 percent in 1970 to 17.3 percent in 2022. The 65-and-over portion of the population rose as much in between 2010 and 2020 as it did between 1960 and 2010. The elderly are living longer, hence are susceptible to increasing ailments treated by increasingly competent, increasingly life-extending and increasingly expensive medical care. Between 1970 and 2022, total Medicare and Medicaid spending (which 30 years ago overtook Social Security as the largest source of transfer spending) grew more than three times faster than total Social Security spending. Medicare spending, adjusted for inflation, rose from $7,000 for every person 65 and older in 1970 to $16,000 in 2022.

Article Source: WaPo

4. Tech Giants' AI Investments Start Paying Dividends

Some of the world’s biggest tech companies showed this week how the tens of billions of dollars they have bet on the artificial intelligence boom are starting to pay off. They also warned bigger investments are coming. Revenue from cloud businesses at Amazon, Microsoft and Google reached a total of $62.9 billion last quarter. That figure is up 22.2% from the same period last year and marked at least the fourth straight quarter in which their combined growth rate has increased. Accelerating growth in cloud computing is the surest sign yet that spending by AI customers is beginning to justify the huge investments tech giants are making in infrastructure to power the technology. Meta plowed $8.3 billion into new property and equipment last quarter, up from $6.5 billion in the same quarter a year ago, as it seeks to build the world’s most-used AI assistant.  

Article Source: WSJ

5. The Battle for Eurasia: North Korean Troops Aid Russia

With the dispatch of thousands of North Korean special forces toward the front lines in Russia’s war against Ukraine — a development first reported by South Korean and Ukrainian intelligence sources, now confirmed by U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin — the emerging contours of global struggle in the post-Cold War era are coming into sharper focus. As North Korean soldiers head into possible combat in Europe — the degree of their ultimate military involvement might turn out to be much greater than generally appreciated — a “World-Island”-style contest seems to be falling into place. Four ambitious, revisionist states at the heart of Eurasia — Russia, China, Iran and North Korea — are coordinating ever more closely to challenge, if not shatter, the prevailing international security order known as Pax Americana. “World-Island” was geo-strategist Halford Mackinder’s memorable description of Eurasia plus Africa in his 1919 book “Democratic Ideals and Reality,” which expanded on his seminal 1904 essay “The Geographical Pivot of History.” Mackinder prophesied, “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland: Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island: Who rules the World-Island commands the World.” Over the past two years, little North Korea has somehow managed to provide an amazing amount of armaments for the Russian war effort. North Korea’s estimated population of 26 million isn’t as large as Texas’s, and its $23 billion gross domestic product in 2023, according to South Korean estimates, doesn’t even beat tiny Vermont’s. Yet Western military intelligence suggest that Pyongyang has thus far nonetheless managed to ship up to 20,000 rail containers of missiles and ammunition for the Russian war effort. At its current production levels, the Russian defense sector might thus have gained the equivalent of several years’ worth of armaments from Pyongyang. According to some Western assessments, up to half the ammunition Russian forces expended in Ukraine this year and last year was of North Korean make — and not obviously inferior to Russia’s own artillery and rockets, at least in the judgment of some experts. the deployment of North Korean forces to support an attack on a Western democracy many thousands of miles from the Pyongyang should awaken Americans to the new power politics of the post-Cold War era. The four aggressive Eurasian dictatorships — Russia, China, Iran and North Korea — are cooperating strategically, and their cooperation is deepening, with an increasing coherence. Three are nuclear-armed and the fourth, Iran, is working to join the club. The day is long past when these regimes posed isolated, discrete threats to Western interests. …they are already more deeply integrated, both economically and militarily, than were the Axis powers of World War II. China and Russia subsidize North Korea. Russia relies on China for markets, Iran for drones and North Korea for materiel and soldiers. Iran gets military technology from North Korea and economic cooperation with Russia and China. And they serve as defense attorneys for one another in international and diplomatic forums. There is now a coordinated challenge to the existing U.S.-led security order that stretches from the Middle East through Eurasia, all the way to the Far East. We must look at the threats we face on World-Island today from the Heartland dictators with new, more strategically sophisticated lenses. We must come to understand that, for all intents and purpose, the war in Gaza and Lebanon against Israel by Iranian proxies is the war by Russia against Ukraine, as would be the war in Taiwan that China may unleash, at a time of Beijing’s own choosing. All one.  

My take The Battle for Eurasia

Article Source: WaPo

November 1, 1946: First NBA game played

Sources

1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/30/upshot/voters-moving-polarization.html

2. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/30/opinion/gender-education-gap.html

3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/30/government-entitlement-spending-medicare-medicaid-social-security/

4. https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/tech-giants-see-ai-bets-starting-to-pay-off-278796f6?st=ej84dD&reflink=article_copyURL_share

5. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/27/north-korea-troops-russia-ukraine/