The other day someone said, " We can no longer afford the rich." I thought it was a pretty good throw away line in the current debate about taxes. Clever but no more than a throw away. I did notice and comment that it certainly could be a dangerous thought. It IS the kind of thought that can be associated with the French Revolution and the attendant excesses.
Then I started to think about it. What, exactly, do these guys do? Well, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs started the computer revolution. Yeah, that's what made them rich. I don't know that Micro Soft or Apple continues with any significant input from either one . And, yes, I am aware Jobs is dead. Kinda makes my point. What does the co-founder of Home Depot do? Nothing. He was in on the idea of consolidating the distribution of building products but that was 40 years ago. Sam Walton? Same story. There's no ongoing innovation, no new, fresh ideas.
Then you have a second tier of individuals that never had an original idea but managed to work themselves into positions of exploiting going concerns. The Kochs and Romneys of the world. They never did toil but they sure do reap. At the bottom of this well fed food chain you have people like the Bushs who have augmented fortunes by nothing other than influence pedaling. It was said of Prescott Bush, he had the remarkable talent of walking thru a room and millions in public funds would disappear. His offspring have maintained the talent. Look into the RTC and the Enron mess.
Almost without exception these people have stepped far away from the fruits of their talents or any real contact with the original talents that built the wealth. What exactly are they good for? So many of them have devoted efforts to rearranging society to meet personal ends. To be blunt, so many have simply become malefactors of great wealth who mistake personal interest for the greater good and they don't seem to be very smart about it.
They have just managed to add 1.5 trillion to the national debt. At this minute the debt service on the national debt is the second largest annual cash outlay we have behind defense. Without the recent fiddling with the marginal tax rates, in 5 years it will be our largest annual expense at well over a trillion yearly. Compound interest is relentless and cuts both ways. The majority of the tax money to meet those expenses is going to come from the one percent as it always has. That looks pretty dumb to me. Now we see two reasons we might not be able to continue to afford the rich. They really don't do anything and they seem to be really dumb. Revolutions have been based on less.
I don't think we can afford either the ultra rich or revolution. Better get a handle on this mess now.
Wednesday, January 31, 2018
Friday, January 26, 2018
Time and Temperature
I was riding in a taxi. I wasn't in an Uber. That's a distinction. Although for our purposes it's a distinction without a difference.
We stopped for a light and on the corner was a bank with a time and temperature sign. You don't see that much anymore but they used to be all over the place. I reached in my pocket for my phone to see if the sign was accurate. It was 2 minutes slow. That made me think of when we all had watches. None of them kept perfect time. You knew if your watch gained or lost time in the course of a day and you knew how much. If you pried the back off there was a little pointer dealy that would let you advance or retard the mechanism. Depending on how much you had paid for the watch, you might let a jeweler make that adjustment. Then they came out with the little quartz clocks. For a buck you had a timepiece that kept perfect time. I'm sure there's an old truck rusting away against a fence in a junk yard somewhere with one of those things I stuck on the dashboard still ticking off perfect time. It made me think of how groups used to synchronize their watches. That made me think of "Catch 22". Cool.
No one wears a watch anymore except in magazine ads. Now we all have cell phones and they all keep perfect, satellite dependent time. My phone, my cable box and my computer all consistently agree that I'm usually late but at least I know, reliably, to the minute, how late and I don't have to change them for daylight savings time. I'm relieved.
Time is completely, sidereal and objective. Temperature is something else as we all know from fighting over blankets. It's subjective. As a single man I always slept with the register blocked and the window cracked open. When I got married my wife said, "You're an idiot." and fixed that. Maybe so.
Bank clocks for a while gave both the Fahrenheit temperature and the Centigrade. Fahrenheit was subjective, being based on the temperature at which ocean water freezes and the body temperature of the average man. Predictably he was 2.6 degrees off on the body temperature thing. That's not really technically right but it helps make my point.
Centigrade was an effort to make it all completely objective. The difference between pure water freezing and water boiling at sea level divide by tens. Metric. They screwed that up by anthropomorphizing it by renaming it Celsius after the guy who came up with it. Just stupid. Celsius would not have approved. I assume it would drive him crazy they missed his entire point by anthropomorphizing the name.
That got me thinking about Imperial Measure verses Metric. Celcius predated formal Metric Measure by quite a bit. It was an idea that had floated around for a long time. Metric appealed to Napoleon because he didn't like the British much. In the end, you really can't blame him. There's that whole Waterloo thing. Not to mention St Helena.
A foot measure is based on the length of a King's actual foot. It does make you wonder why inches aren't called toes and it makes you wonder if he had twelve toes. It is totally subjective. Napoleon had the idea of sending out survey teams to measure enough of the earth's arc to determine one one millionth of the distance between the Equator and the North Pole. It turns out to be about a yard. I don't know of any English kings with three feet. Think about that for a minute. I mean the effort to measure the circumference of the earth. Not the 12 toes thing. I can't find a reference to how close the French got but in the end you have to realize that too was totally subjective.
So the Metric System was born in rejection of the Imperial Measure System and has been sold ever since as simpler, more objective and more exact. Bullshit.
Frankly, if you can't deal with the units of 4, 8, 12, 16, 32, etc of Imperial Measure, you just aren't mentally agile enough for the Metric System to do much for you. That's my two bits worth and if you don't get that joke, I and you just wasted a lot of time.
Then the light changed, we drove off and I started thinking about Game Theory.
We stopped for a light and on the corner was a bank with a time and temperature sign. You don't see that much anymore but they used to be all over the place. I reached in my pocket for my phone to see if the sign was accurate. It was 2 minutes slow. That made me think of when we all had watches. None of them kept perfect time. You knew if your watch gained or lost time in the course of a day and you knew how much. If you pried the back off there was a little pointer dealy that would let you advance or retard the mechanism. Depending on how much you had paid for the watch, you might let a jeweler make that adjustment. Then they came out with the little quartz clocks. For a buck you had a timepiece that kept perfect time. I'm sure there's an old truck rusting away against a fence in a junk yard somewhere with one of those things I stuck on the dashboard still ticking off perfect time. It made me think of how groups used to synchronize their watches. That made me think of "Catch 22". Cool.
No one wears a watch anymore except in magazine ads. Now we all have cell phones and they all keep perfect, satellite dependent time. My phone, my cable box and my computer all consistently agree that I'm usually late but at least I know, reliably, to the minute, how late and I don't have to change them for daylight savings time. I'm relieved.
Time is completely, sidereal and objective. Temperature is something else as we all know from fighting over blankets. It's subjective. As a single man I always slept with the register blocked and the window cracked open. When I got married my wife said, "You're an idiot." and fixed that. Maybe so.
Bank clocks for a while gave both the Fahrenheit temperature and the Centigrade. Fahrenheit was subjective, being based on the temperature at which ocean water freezes and the body temperature of the average man. Predictably he was 2.6 degrees off on the body temperature thing. That's not really technically right but it helps make my point.
Centigrade was an effort to make it all completely objective. The difference between pure water freezing and water boiling at sea level divide by tens. Metric. They screwed that up by anthropomorphizing it by renaming it Celsius after the guy who came up with it. Just stupid. Celsius would not have approved. I assume it would drive him crazy they missed his entire point by anthropomorphizing the name.
That got me thinking about Imperial Measure verses Metric. Celcius predated formal Metric Measure by quite a bit. It was an idea that had floated around for a long time. Metric appealed to Napoleon because he didn't like the British much. In the end, you really can't blame him. There's that whole Waterloo thing. Not to mention St Helena.
A foot measure is based on the length of a King's actual foot. It does make you wonder why inches aren't called toes and it makes you wonder if he had twelve toes. It is totally subjective. Napoleon had the idea of sending out survey teams to measure enough of the earth's arc to determine one one millionth of the distance between the Equator and the North Pole. It turns out to be about a yard. I don't know of any English kings with three feet. Think about that for a minute. I mean the effort to measure the circumference of the earth. Not the 12 toes thing. I can't find a reference to how close the French got but in the end you have to realize that too was totally subjective.
So the Metric System was born in rejection of the Imperial Measure System and has been sold ever since as simpler, more objective and more exact. Bullshit.
Frankly, if you can't deal with the units of 4, 8, 12, 16, 32, etc of Imperial Measure, you just aren't mentally agile enough for the Metric System to do much for you. That's my two bits worth and if you don't get that joke, I and you just wasted a lot of time.
Then the light changed, we drove off and I started thinking about Game Theory.
Zero Sum
I'm really surprised at how so many of the wealthy look at our country and economy, how we all regard our fellow citizens. I'm surprised at the pervasive misunderstanding of what's actually going on here.
I was reading about 'game theory'. Apparently the whole thing is predicated on the idea, once you get beyond a room full of carefully selected people no one has the faintest idea what's going on and we're all better off to keep them busy playing Monopoly or maybe Risk if they're part of the military or the diplomatic corps. I have seen better security strategies formulated by 5 stoners playing Risk than what we see now.
In game theory there is the idea of a 'Zero Sum' game. The idea for every winner there is a loser. Let me say this so everyone gets it. THE UNITED STATES IS NOT A ZERO SUM GAME. You idiots.
We seem to have hit upon an unscrewable pooch though they keep trying. The same 1% or so are going to keep paying the vast majority of the income taxes no matter how much we screw around with the marginal tax rates from year to year. In the end we're going to go to the people with the money to pay the bills. Screwin around with the tax rates just adds debt service to the inevitable bill.
I have been fond of saying, whatever your current net worth is; double it. That's what it would be if Reagan had never been president. That's true but it is also true for the very richest among us. When we say bad ideas cripple all of us it's useful to remember all of us include the one percent. The rich equal the number of illegal aliens. They equal the number of active felons. The bills have to be paid. It serves us all to make it easier for the rich to pay the bills. We can say they benefit the most but in the end, they have the money. It's a cinch the illegal aliens and the active felons don't have the money though the classes of the rich and active felons do tend to overlap. So do the other classes. The point is: where's the money coming from? The rich will have an easier time without adding debt service..
I thought rich people were supposed to be smart. We're getting to the point where this blatant stupidity is making it so we can't afford the rich. They should watch out for that formulation. We really don't want the lumpenproletariat firing up the tumbrels. It gets messy. WE should watch out for that formulation.
So, we're not a Zero Sum game. It's wrong to say the sky is the limit when we have shown that the stars are the limit at least. When you consider higher mathematics, space/time itself may be in our reach and perhaps even in our grasp. So, quit screwin around and pay your damned taxes. Quit thinkin you're gonna foist them off on the rest of us. We don't have any gotdamned money. You don't pay us enough. Haven't you seen the papers?
I was reading about 'game theory'. Apparently the whole thing is predicated on the idea, once you get beyond a room full of carefully selected people no one has the faintest idea what's going on and we're all better off to keep them busy playing Monopoly or maybe Risk if they're part of the military or the diplomatic corps. I have seen better security strategies formulated by 5 stoners playing Risk than what we see now.
In game theory there is the idea of a 'Zero Sum' game. The idea for every winner there is a loser. Let me say this so everyone gets it. THE UNITED STATES IS NOT A ZERO SUM GAME. You idiots.
We seem to have hit upon an unscrewable pooch though they keep trying. The same 1% or so are going to keep paying the vast majority of the income taxes no matter how much we screw around with the marginal tax rates from year to year. In the end we're going to go to the people with the money to pay the bills. Screwin around with the tax rates just adds debt service to the inevitable bill.
I have been fond of saying, whatever your current net worth is; double it. That's what it would be if Reagan had never been president. That's true but it is also true for the very richest among us. When we say bad ideas cripple all of us it's useful to remember all of us include the one percent. The rich equal the number of illegal aliens. They equal the number of active felons. The bills have to be paid. It serves us all to make it easier for the rich to pay the bills. We can say they benefit the most but in the end, they have the money. It's a cinch the illegal aliens and the active felons don't have the money though the classes of the rich and active felons do tend to overlap. So do the other classes. The point is: where's the money coming from? The rich will have an easier time without adding debt service..
I thought rich people were supposed to be smart. We're getting to the point where this blatant stupidity is making it so we can't afford the rich. They should watch out for that formulation. We really don't want the lumpenproletariat firing up the tumbrels. It gets messy. WE should watch out for that formulation.
So, we're not a Zero Sum game. It's wrong to say the sky is the limit when we have shown that the stars are the limit at least. When you consider higher mathematics, space/time itself may be in our reach and perhaps even in our grasp. So, quit screwin around and pay your damned taxes. Quit thinkin you're gonna foist them off on the rest of us. We don't have any gotdamned money. You don't pay us enough. Haven't you seen the papers?
Saturday, January 13, 2018
Me Too.
I'm not sure what I think about people being encouraged to air 20 and 30 year old grievances. I don't know that it's actually therapeutic in any way or fair to someone who is 20 to 30 years older. Men have always been pigs and times and standards change. I'm certainly not trying to excuse bad behavior but "he said/she said" is always doubtful at best.
Having said that and certainly alienating some of my friends I will add this: I had the very rare opportunity of being a bachelor for nearly 20 years of my adult life. I wasn't a bad looking guy and I possessed one very attractive quality: Gainful employment. I met probably more than my share of women.
Because I was young and essentially brainless I used to think it was cute to ask young women of my acquaintance how they lost their virginity. It didn't take, even me, very long to stop doing that because the answers I got were so often about some tragic encounter with an older relative or some other tale of rape or near rape. Who the hell wants to be reminded of that?
These weren't women of some isolated, promiscuous class. They could easily be your sister or neighbor or a co-worker. Their assailants could also, easily be your neighbor or coworker or casual acquaintance. I'm hoping they weren't relatives.
In a perfect world, everyone gets to experience that nervous, sweet, fumbling of that first encounter leading to the innocent growth of shared intimacy. Everywhere we look the world is just not perfect. That doesn't mean we should become numb or just give up.
If it takes something like # Me Too to begin to correct certain things then I'm all for it. If some otherwise innocent men are traumatized unfairly it just doesn't seem like that much of a price to pay. If it makes some guy ask himself, " Me too?' then I'm definitely all for it.
So, it seems as though, on further reflection, I AM sure of what I think. It turns out that, further reflection, is kinda the real point.
Having said that and certainly alienating some of my friends I will add this: I had the very rare opportunity of being a bachelor for nearly 20 years of my adult life. I wasn't a bad looking guy and I possessed one very attractive quality: Gainful employment. I met probably more than my share of women.
Because I was young and essentially brainless I used to think it was cute to ask young women of my acquaintance how they lost their virginity. It didn't take, even me, very long to stop doing that because the answers I got were so often about some tragic encounter with an older relative or some other tale of rape or near rape. Who the hell wants to be reminded of that?
These weren't women of some isolated, promiscuous class. They could easily be your sister or neighbor or a co-worker. Their assailants could also, easily be your neighbor or coworker or casual acquaintance. I'm hoping they weren't relatives.
In a perfect world, everyone gets to experience that nervous, sweet, fumbling of that first encounter leading to the innocent growth of shared intimacy. Everywhere we look the world is just not perfect. That doesn't mean we should become numb or just give up.
If it takes something like # Me Too to begin to correct certain things then I'm all for it. If some otherwise innocent men are traumatized unfairly it just doesn't seem like that much of a price to pay. If it makes some guy ask himself, " Me too?' then I'm definitely all for it.
So, it seems as though, on further reflection, I AM sure of what I think. It turns out that, further reflection, is kinda the real point.
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