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“So you listen to me and you listen well.  Are you behind on your credit card bills?  Good, pick up the phone and start dialing!  Is your landlord ready to evict you?  Good!  Pick up the phone and start dialing!” – The Wolf of Wall Street

So, this is how I viewed the world when I was in college.  Free money!  What could go wrong???

It started as an innocent dinner conversation.  One thing about our dinner conversations – they’re not normal.  We might discuss topics as diverse as financial impacts of currency devaluation on the Roman Empire, or what food makes Pugsley toot the most.  It turns out its pretty much any food, he claims, except for ice cream from Dairy Queen® and Cheetos® and whatever else he’s eating at the time.

But this night The Boy piped up.  “Hey, Dad, I was thinking about getting a credit card.”

Being that he’s 18, he’s and adult and that’s his right.

“What credit card were you thinking of getting?”

“Well, one company sent me an application . . .”

“So, if you were going to buy a car, would you just drive down the street and just buy the first one you saw?”

Long pause.  My dad logic was a laser-guided missile.

“Well,” he replied, “I really don’t know much about credit cards.  Can you help?”

I can.  And I promised I would.

So here it is:

The first thing a young person should know about credit cards is that they are evil.  Not evil in the sense of being a direct minion in the service of Satan® that slowly creates global warming just so it can barbeque endangered species over oil from the tar sands in Canada™.  No, credit cards are worse.  Besides, have you ever eaten slow-cooked panda with bald eagle sauce?  Or fried whale?

This may be the first time this sentence has been written in English:  “You haven’t eaten until you’ve eaten panda.”  Goes great with ketchup.  Tastes like chicken.

Wait, where were we?  Oh yeah, why are credit cards evil?

Mark Twain had the answer:  “Willpower lasts about two weeks, and is soluble in alcohol.”

Yeah, the credit card company was pretty excited when I bought that original picture of Cats Playing Poker.  Who knew there would be no market for that??

Let’s conduct an experiment that shows how 18 year olds feel about money.  Pretend you’re 18.  For the average adult, one fifth of scotch should do to start the simulation.  Now, let’s pretend your net worth is, oh, some paperback books, t-shirts you got in high school for band camp, and empty tubes of acne medication you planned on turning into an attractive art piece.  Now, stare at your phone a lot.

Now, some nice person has offered to allow you an amazing opportunity.  He sounds nice, but he’ll let you to spend money you don’t have.  He’ll even give it to you in advance.  You’re a good guy.  You deserve this, right?

And for every second that you carry that credit card in your wallet, well, your struggle is to not spend money.  You have it, it’s available.  But you’re 18, and at the peak of hormonal activity in your body.

So, after you’ve spent a Friday night on a crazed PEZ®, pantyhose and elephant ride binge, well, now you have a bill staring at your face for all of that crazed fun.  But, hey, elephant rides, right?  And the bill is approximately every cent that you would make in the next year of your life, if you didn’t have to spend money on stuff like rent, food, gas, and, well, more elephant rides.

The second thing an 18 year old should know about credit cards is that you can’t really have one:

You’re 18.  With no job.  You’re in luck!

In 2009, Congress passed a law that says you can’t have a credit card unless you can pay for it.  Yes.  Banks were giving 18 year olds credit lines even though they had no income.

But after 2009?  Congratulations!  You’re a winner!  You can’t have a credit card.

In what could be seen as the barest hint of morality coming out of Washington, this bill passed with the support of both Republican’ts and DemocRATs.  Yay!  But is it just me that worries that the stuff that gets support of both parties is the scariest?

Anyway, The Boy can get a credit card limit that matches his documented income.  Both of which are zero.

Unless . . . I cosign.

What is a cosigner?

Robert Mueller would call a cosigner an unindicted co-conspirator.  You sign your name to the credit card so your kid can buy pantyhose, PEZ® and elephant rides, but you get no pantyhose, PEZ™, or elephant rides.  And if your kid can’t pay for the cool party?  You pay.

Queue a sad trombone playing.

Note that a co-signed credit card does nothing to help your credit rating.  What’s a credit rating?  It’s a mathematical formula that computes the ability of the banks to squeeze you between two blocks of concrete and extract gold.  The bigger the number?  The more gold they can squeeze out of you, if you start talking back to them.

So, human sacrifice is really in the terms and conditions of every credit card company and on a cosigner they make you live without a kidney or liver.  Just letting you know.

The third thing to know is that you don’t have to worry, the second you turn 21, the banks will be glad to lend you all the money you want that you can’t afford to pay back:

Yes.  When I was in college, there were hot chicks in scanty clothing that attempted to convince you to sign up for a credit card, with the insinuation that, you know, they’d ignore you later after you spent all of your cool credit cash on them.  Party!

And this will happen to you when you turn 21.

Why?

That temptation that I talked about, that constantly burning credit card in your pocket, whispering in your ear “buy me now”?  It is a tool.  It’s a tool with a purpose.

This is why credit cards are awesome . . . for those you have to pay money to.

I was talking with a friend who is a zillionaire.  He had hundreds of apartments in Dallas.  He looked at me and said, “You know, John, it’s like I have an army of slaves working for me every month.  I own the apartments.  They were paid for on the first day they were constructed through me selling government tax credits to third parties.  Then people move in.  And they have to work every day to pay me.”

I was stunned.  Here was a zillionaire, telling me that his tenants were . . . his slaves.  And he is right.  Any time a man is obligated to pay a debt, to work for another is a slave.

The fourth thing you need to know is that debt is enslavement, but enslavement on steroids:

A lease, like a credit card, is a debt.  But a credit card allows you to buy pleasure now for future labor.  But it’s not an even trade.  Every month, the debt gets more added to it.  That debt is interest.  That means that for every elephant ride you charge to your credit card, you have to pay an elephant ride, 25,000 PEZ™, and two pairs of pantyhose.

You have to pay your purchase back, plus more.

When you buy a house, if you can’t afford to pay in cash, you get a loan that’s called a mortgage.  Mortgage is from the Latin root, meaning “Morty” and “Gauge” – so it’s a gauge of how many people named Morty that can live in your house.

Not to get heavy, but, you know, sometimes it’s worth it?  Oh, not really?

Just kidding.  It the Latin root for “mort” is death.  And “gage” is pledge.  Yeah.  A death pledge.  Happy thought, right?  Back in the day you were pledging your life to pay back the loan.  At least they were honest, then – you would die rather than not pay this money back.  But at least you have a pool, right?

The fifth thing you need to know is that credit cards can be a weapon to fight back:

I have in many years, paid for every single Christmas present with rewards from my Visa© card.  Yay!  Credit cards give cash back bonuses for spending with them.  The idea is that you spend money on the card.  They make money when you spend it via extortion fees from the people who sell you stuff.  Buy PEZ® online?  Get cash back.  Buy 25 Macanudo™ cigars online?  Burn the enemy’s crops.  Heck, Mark Twain used to smoke 300 cigars a month.

But what did that guy ever accomplish?

The sixth thing you need to know is that credit cards only make sense when they make sense:

I was married before I met The Mrs.  It was a mixed marriage.  I was human, she was Klingon®.

Just sayin’

How much would you pay to be rid of a Klingon™?  Well, as Henny Youngman asked . . . “Why are divorces so expensive?”

His response:  “They’re worth it.”

After my divorce from She Who Will Not Be Named, I was in debt.  My student loans.  My death pledge mortgage.  The debts from the marriage.  I consolidated them into four credit cards.  The total was enough to allow me to have gone to the Super Bowl® on a private jet with 2/5ths of the Spice Girls® as companions.  But all I had was a bill.

Well, maybe I’d pass on all of the Spice Girls®.  (Shudder)

It was paid off three years later.  Thankfully, I didn’t have to wash Spice Girl© off of me.

The seventh and final point is this:

Credit cards are like fire:  helpful when you are in control, but like ice cream and Cheetos®, a fearful master.

And, for extra credit:

I hate to ask this question, but I must:  how much could we achieve as a civilization if we abandoned debt.  Paid it off.  Bought houses with cash.  Paid up front?

What if interest was illegal?

What if no one was a slave to debt?  What if our country paid our bills, in full, every month?

Everyone who reads this blog knows I’m a fan of capitalism.  Of freedom.  Of Western Civilization.  I’m not sure that interest is required for any of these.

Discuss.  A Macanudo® to the best response . . . or some PEZ®.  Your call.

“Yes.  I’ve left everything to the Flat Earth Society.  But don’t worry about it.  I’m forted up here with plenty of firepower.” – Hopscotch

A trip flying from Seattle at night to Fairbanks in the summertime.  You leave in darkness, and then arrive at 2AM in a perfect daylight.  Proof of a flat Earth!

I really enjoy a good conspiracy theory.  The very best ones make claims that are entirely consistent with agreed-upon facts, and that you can’t disprove.  The JFK assassination theories are an amazing treasure trove of paranoia, and so are a thousand others – from ancient aliens to “we knew the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor,” to the theory that your Mom is bigfoot (that would explain her back hair).

The conspiracy theory that’s currently ascendant is “Flat Earth Theory.”

Yes.

Flat Earth theory says the Earth is, well, flat.  And this theory has been gaining followers globally.

Did you see that, globally?  Heh.  I crack myself up.

Anyway.

And here I thought that Bugs Bunny® had solved the issue once and for all.

The idea is that the North Pole is center of a disk – and the Sun is only 32 miles in diameter, and 1,500 miles away.  Likewise, the Moon is only 32 miles in diameter and 1,500 miles away.  Seems legit!  What about the South Pole?  The South Pole isn’t.  It’s the edge of a pancake, with a 150’ ice wall that surrounds the disk of the flat Earth.  And, while vague, it sounds like there’s a dome about 700 miles up.

So how do we explain the International Space Station (ISS)?  The ISS is either a secret NASA spy plane, or maybe a secret NASA hologram projection to make us think there’s an ISS.  And satellites?  Totally fake.  There’s no way that your DirecTV© technician could possibly aim at a spot 22,000 miles away moving at 7,000 miles per hour!

Of course, that means the Moon landings were fake (its own conspiracy theory by itself).  And O.J. Simpson had to go to prison for starring in Capricorn One® (a movie that showed a fake Mars landing) because that would totally have stopped NASA.

Like I said – these theories are fascinating.  Most of them are hard to refute, but Flat Earthers are so very easy to refute, it’s like placing a kitten in a room full of velociraptors.  Not really sporting.

I’m not going to get into the energy flux that would have to be created by a 32 mile diameter Sun to warm the Earth, even if only 1500 miles away.  But we’ve been sending people to Antarctica for over 100 years.  The first people to reach it was Roald Amundsen back in 1911.

To believe in the Flat Earth, one would have to believe in a conspiracy heading back over 100 years.  To add further problems for the Flat Earthers – the differing constellations south of the equator should be visible from a flat Earth (which I can personally attest to), Polaris being at different positions in the sky based on latitude (personally verified by me during my Alaska days), and Johnny Depp having a career.  Johnny Depp would never have a career on a Flat Earth.

But NASA would also have had to flawlessly fake all of the Moon Landings, all of the satellite launches, a shuttle program, and Elon Musk’s ego.  Not possible for a group that wanted to inject water into the Yellowstone Caldera to cool the magma chamber and (probably) trigger a volcano – I wish I were making this up, but I wrote about it here (LINK).  Large swaths of NASA are hopelessly inept and stupid.  They couldn’t keep an afternoon nap secret.

Oh, and sending O.J. to prison for murder to keep him quiet about “faking the Moon landing”?  Capricorn One was a movie that had been out 18 years by the time O.J. was arrested.  If so, their punishment of James Brolin was even worse – they made him marry Barbra Streisand.

And as for a technician being able to point a dish at a satellite that’s moving at thousands of miles per hour?  Well, it has to move at thousands of miles per hour, since it’s in stationary orbit around the Earth.  It’s easy to point an antenna at something that’s not moving (relative to you).

See, they are moving fast to stay stationary!  If they want to go anywhere, they’d have to move faster still.

Francisco Esquembre, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia

The question isn’t if the Flat Earth theory is correct.  It obviously isn’t.  But the question is why would someone believe in something (and I believe that the believers in the Flat Earth are sincere) that is observably disprovable?  In today’s world, you’d have to really make an effort to ignore/come up with complicated alternative answers to data clearly visible around you daily.

(By my count, there can’t be more than a few thousand of these believers in the Western world, but they make a lot of YouTube videos.)

So, why?  In some cases faith.  The idea of a flat Earth is based on (some) interpretations of Biblical passages.  In some cases reasoning.  The main proponent of the Flat Earth Society® for decades mentioned that he felt that way from when he was young – and that his teacher in second grade was lying to him.  He reasoned that the simplest thing was a flat Earth.  Other writings (some guy who named himself Koresh – not from Waco but this time from Illinois) explicitly called for a flat Earth, such that teaching normal geography was banned in the local schools around Zion, Illinois until the 1920’s when they disbanded.

But the rumor is that bigfoot your Mom scared them away.

“The year is 1987, and NASA launches the last of America’s deep space probes. In a freak mishap, Ranger 3 and its pilot, Captain William “Buck” Rogers, are blown out of their trajectory into an orbit which freezes his life support systems, and returns Buck Rogers to Earth.  500 years later.” – Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century

No comment required.

There is a theme in legend, called “The King in the Mountain.”  In this theme, a hero from history awaits.  The hero, though wounded, or old, or with a bad case of the sniffles, waits.  Generally the hero is awaiting a future time when he will be needed to save the nation he is associated with.  One example of this is the legend of King Arthur.  Arthur is said not to have died, but to be resting in Avalon for when he is needed by Britain, and then he will emerge from his sleep, his sword Excalibur in his hand, to save Britain.  One would assume he has a good mattress for a sleep this long.  Whenever I go longer than about 8 hours my back lets me know about it . . .

Since Britain has now outlawed all weapons, up to and including dull butter knives, I’m thinking Arthur would face this fate upon his return.  The Royal Navy now has fewer ships than at any point in the last 370 years, so if he avoids arrest he might have his work cut out for him if a group of toddlers decide to take over the UK.

Arthur’s legend dates back at least to 600 A.D., but other regions have similar tales, such as the legend of Holger Danske, a big Danish guy who sleeps and will come to the aid of Denmark when it’s in peril.  Like Arthur, he’s asleep in Avalon, and also like Arthur, he’s spent some time (wink-wink) with Morgan le Fey.

Here’s Holger.  He looks like he’s pretty buff.  I bet he deadlifts like 500 pounds, bro.   CC BY SA 3.0, from Wikimedia.

So the concept of suspended animation has been with us for centuries, and most of the time the “suspended animation” has been just your garden variety of time-stopping sleep which lasts centuries and is susceptible to interruption only by current events.  Buck Rogers (who went from the 1920’s to the 2400’s fell asleep due to radioactive gas in a mine (in the original story published in 1928).

But I think that Clarence Birdseye® was the real inspiration for those that spend time dreaming about suspended animation.  Birdseye™ invented a way to quickly freeze food (in about 1924) so that it retained flavor, texture, and nutrition better.  Soon enough, the first frozen dinner was in stores.  And in 1931 a young boy named Robert Ettinger read the short story, “Jameson’s Brain” about a gentleman named Jameson that was frozen in orbit.  Jameson was frozen for about a million years, and some robots put his thawed brain into a robot.  As attractive as the whole “human brain in a robot body” goes, I mean, who wouldn’t be attracted to that?

Ettinger from that moment was fixated on a science he dubbed Cryonics.  He even wrote about it in a short science fiction story that was published in Startling Stories in 1948 (it’s pretty rough, but it’s also pretty short).  In 1962 Ettinger wrote a book called The Prospect of Immortality.  You can find it for free online.  His book was pivotal in getting attention to Cryonics, and in 1967 the first corpse patient was frozen.  That was one of Ettinger’s ideas – death should be looked at not as a final state (in some cases).  Where there was sufficient medical equipment and know-how, he reasoned, death could be considered to be a temporary condition, a setback that could be cured.  Die in the Amazon (not Jeff Bezo’s place, the actual jungle) and you’re dead.  Die in a modern city near modern medical equipment?  Maybe you and Buck Rogers can swap stories about Wilma Deering.

The basic theory is that your brain stores information in such a manner that it’s retrievable after you die.  It retains your personality and memory.  The basis for this (according to Ettinger’s book) is that rats, nearly frozen, no circulation for hours, were revived.  The rats had been taught tricks, like how to vote on a bill in Congress.  After being thawed out, the rats remembered the tricks they had been taught.  It might be a stretch to say that the personality and memory would be the same, but at least Ettinger had some evidence that it might work.

So, after thawing you might get a new cloned body to put your brain into.  That would be cool if we knew how to do any of that.  Or we could scan the brain and put your memories and personality into a computer.  If we did either of these, we wouldn’t need to store the whole body – we could just store the head.  And storing the head is one option if you’re on a budget and not wedded to the “I need my body” thought process.

Or we could fix the original body, if we had a cure for whatever killed you and you weren’t a cheapskate.

Hey, maybe you could have a robot body, too.

How could this possibly go wrong?  Peter Weller is our friend, right?

So death goes from being the end to being a temporary stop along the way to the future.  But the problem is that people really don’t like being frozen.  And their organs like it even less.  Freezing cells dehydrate.  I had thought that ice crystals formed inside the cells, but my research for this post says that the cells dehydrate, ice crystals form outside the cell walls, and then the resulting salty sludge left in the cell couldn’t support life.  Freezing is pretty destructive.  Frostbite seems to come to mind . . . .

In the 1980’s, a scientist had an idea:  inject antifreeze into the cells and cool them down in such a fashion that ice crystals don’t form and the frozen body becomes like glass:

Don’t dwell on it . . . (I think this image was originated from Alcor, a cryonics firm)

The problem is the “antifreeze” that gets pumped into the organ/body is . . . toxic, which implies that in order to freeze the organs, you have to poison them.  And getting the antifreeze into and around the brain (which is pretty dense) is rough – there’s some speculation that the amount of pumping and pressure required to get the antifreeze into the brain might just damage it to the point that it’s useless.

The bet for the future is that we’ll have “new technology” (Nanotechnology?  Better beer bongs? High Definition rubber bands?) that will solve the problems associated with freezing the corpses patients in the first place.  Also, I give Ettinger credit:  he’s frozen at -140˚C (room temperature in Canada) along with both his first wife and his second wife, which might cause all sorts of complications upon thawing.

I first learned about cryonics through science fiction.  The noted fiction author Larry Niven referred to frozen people as corpsicles, and his novel A World Out of Time is based upon a thawed corpsicle working as a slave to a totalitarian future government.  Which gives him a space ship, for some reason.  They gave the corpsicles jobs that Future Serfs won’t do.  Maybe they can give corpsicles the job that future people won’t do . . . like . . . saving Britain?

“Her actual name is:  Penelope Mountbatten Hapsburg Hohenzollern Mulan-Pocahontas.” – The Simpsons

So, if your European Dynasty is the subject of Internet memes in 2010’s?  You know you were inbred.

Last week on Monday’s post I wrote about how a massive amount of wealth that wasn’t tied to any production (New World gold) weakened Spain in every conceivable way (LINK).  A comment on that post indicated that wealth alone wasn’t the whole story.  The Hapsburgs were horrible leaders because they were rendered idiots by centuries of inbreeding and watching reality television.

That’s where we get to the Hapsburgs and genetics.

The House of Hapsburg started with the unlikely named Count Radbot.  If ever there was an argument that Europe was run by time travelling robots or the writers of the game Fallout, well, the fact that a major European dynasty was started by a person named Radbot is probably the best evidence to date.  Radbot built Hapsburg Castle in around 1020.  His grandson, Otto, took the name of the Castle and became Otto Von Hapsburg.  Eventually the family moved to Austria, and took over the country in 1276.  They only ruled Austria until 1918.

Count Radbot was also a fixture in the Sunday comics for thirty years – often he would chase a cartoon cat and fight comically with him over hamburgers.

Besides the whole, “ruling huge chunks of Europe for 650 years” thing, the other thing that the Hapsburg dynasty was really known for was . . . serious inbreeding.

For being a bunch on inbred sometime-morons, they seemed to do okay.  CC by SA 3.0, Original by Wikipedia User Alphathon

The Hapsburg family kept breeding cousins because that was a great way to not share power with outside families.  Unfortunately, cousins that have been breeding only with each other limit the gene pool pretty severely.  Charles II of Spain (shown below) had comparable genetics to a child born of a brother and sister.  He was reportedly:  “ . . . short, lame, epileptic, senile and completely bald before 35, always on the verge of death but repeatedly baffling Christendom by continuing to live.”  Charles reigned between 1665 and 1700, and when he died it plunged Europe into the War of Spanish Succession as the Hapsburgs attempted to control who would become the next King of Spain.

Charles II of Spain.  What a catch!  I think he was featured in several of the “Hills Have Eyes” movies . . . keep in mind that painters tried to make their subjects look better in their portraits than they did in real life . . . .

Evidence is fairly clear at this point that genetic difficulties led to the final problems of Spain that led to the fall of the Spanish Empire.

This is an example of genetics that are too close . . . there is no variation because there is far too small a gene pool to contend with.

A modern city is the opposite.  People are mobile, and cities are growing – there’s a great deal of movement from the countryside to the cities.  A Yale® study indicated (LINK) that by 2030, 10% of the land surface of the Earth will be covered by cities.  To get to that number, the equivalent of 20,000 football fields are being paved.

Daily.

Major cities perhaps are the opposite of diversity – they may be the greatest homogeneity.  Unique cultures and traditions are moving to the cities and destroying diversity – even within groups that are remaining distinct.  In order to avoid arguments that are outside of the point I’m making today, the metropolitan area that I’m picking to make my point is . . . Beijing, China (as opposed to Beijing, Oklahoma, population 6).

Beijing is interesting in that the ethnic makeup change appears to be zero – so I can happily avoid (at least for this blog) those questions.  But what’s changing?  The city has had a tremendous influx of people from 2000 to 2010, over eight million.  But Beijing remains a Chinese city, specifically Han Chinese.  So what’s the argument about diversity here, John Wilder?

China is a pretty big country, and there are about a million villages in China.  The average, medium sized village has about 500 people, and 7 to 10 clans.  Some of these villages have histories spanning thousands of years, with customs and families reaching far into the past.  Over time, there is genetic drift – a village in Northern China doesn’t look nearly the same as one in Southern China.  Both are Han Chinese, but differing diseases, climates, history, original genetic stock, and, well, luck play a part in allowing a diversity to flourish among the villages.  China has a history of amazing innovation.  How much a part of this does the village structure explain?  How much genius sprang up because of the stability of those villages?

From Freeman Dyson (LINK):

West does not mention another scaling law that works in the opposite direction. That is the law of genetic drift, mentioned earlier as a crucial factor in the evolution of small populations. If a small population is inbreeding, the rate of drift of the average measure of any human capability scales with the inverse square root of the population. Big fluctuations of the average happen in isolated villages far more often than in cities. On the average, people in villages are not more capable than people in cities. But if ten million people are divided into a thousand genetically isolated villages, there is a good chance that one lucky village will have a population with outstandingly high average capability, and there is a good chance that an inbreeding population with high average capability produces an occasional bunch of geniuses in a short time. The effect of genetic isolation is even stronger if the population of the village is divided by barriers of rank or caste or religion. Social snobbery can be as effective as geography in keeping people from spreading their genes widely.

A substantial fraction of the population of Europe and the Middle East in the time between 1000 BC and 1800 AD lived in genetically isolated villages, so that genetic drift may have been the most important factor making intellectual revolutions possible. Places where intellectual revolutions happened include, among many others, Jerusalem around 800 BC (the invention of monotheistic religion), Athens around 500 BC (the invention of drama and philosophy and the beginnings of science), Venice around 1300 AD (the invention of modern commerce), Florence around 1600 (the invention of modern science), and Manchester around 1750 (the invention of modern industry).

These places were all villages, with populations of a few tens of thousands, divided into tribes and social classes with even smaller populations. In each case, a small starburst of geniuses emerged from a small inbred population within a few centuries, and changed our ways of thinking irreversibly. These eruptions have many historical causes. Cultural and political accidents may provide unusual opportunities for young geniuses to exploit. But the appearance of a starburst must be to some extent a consequence of genetic drift. The examples that I mentioned all belong to Western cultures. No doubt similar starbursts of genius occurred in other cultures, but I am ignorant of the details of their history.

I suggest you read the whole thing – it’s fascinating.  And Dyson dates things properly – BC, AD.  If you’re not familiar with Dyson, he’s a physicist and scientist of renown, the Dyson sphere – an artificial sphere built around a planet – is one of his most known ideas.

From this, one could surmise that the “end of diversity” even among ethnically homogeneous societies will rob us of genetic variation that will advance the human race, perhaps even greatly.  Would places like Stanford® or Harvard® provide a place where this (intellectual) genetic diversity could flourish?  I’m not sure, but I don’t think so.  The time and relative isolation required for drift appear to be missing.

Genetics may be like water – when frozen through inbreeding, no progress is possible.  When boiling in a city, no usefully differential structures form in the chaos.  When in the right size populace for a period of time?  The lukewarm water of interesting change, complexity can form.  Like Goldilocks:  too hot, too cold, and then just right.

What do we lose if we don’t have that drift, if we don’t have those periodic bursts of genius arising out of that properly complex world?  Is it odd to think that cities, which we think of as engines of diversity are really just engines of future homogeneity?

Thankfully we don’t have to worry about that, because our new robotic overlord, Count Radbot, will come from the future to save us all!

“Now can you believe it?  After only five years of playing football, I got a college degree.  Mama was so proud.” – Forrest Gump

This bridge is based on one I sketched one day.  Oh, wait, it was built before I ever sketched it.  Nevermind.

The easiest way to determine a lie is to see what everyone believes in.

Almost always they’re wrong.

The delusions of crowds are nearly legendary.  Teenage girls are suddenly transformed into witches in colonial Salem, rather than in Middle School, like normally happens.  Stock prices always go up.  Until they collapse in a pile of hope-flavored rubble.  Housing prices always go up, until they don’t and cause the government to throw piles of money into the air hoping that it will hit someone on the way down.

“Everybody should go to college” is another one of those things that “everybody knows”.  And it’s just as wrong as the examples listed above, and a lot more damaging.  And I firmly used to believe this, as well – I was a part of “everyone believes”.  The idea that everyone (well, most people) should go to college was just ingrained.

Why would I believe that?

Well, in my mind, college was a useful experience that helped people to be prepared to be of value to society (and themselves!) through education and progressive exposure to responsibility.

To a certain extent, that was true.  But most people I know and work with have at least a bachelor’s degree.  And most of my friends from high school have at least one if not multiple degrees from college.  And I have a masters.  And The Mrs. has a masters.  The odds of that randomly happening?  1 in 17,232,000.  Okay.  I made that number up.  But the odds are pretty low, given random selection.  In reality?  It happens a lot.

Before 1980, about half of the guys who graduated from high school (which is not everyone – only 70% or so people graduate) went to college.

So, if you simplify a bit – 50% of 70% is 35%.  The top third (or so) of your group went to college.  Historically, about a third would drop out.  That left 20% or so of the population with college degrees, which made them relatively more valuable.  It meant that you could work at a goal for four or five years and accomplish it.

Now, however, about 70% of high school graduates go to college, and women outnumber men (which we may or may not get into on this post).  Now, 70% of people (still) graduate from high school.  So, roughly 50% go to college.  That’s a huge increase (40%+!) in just a few decades!

And the college graduation rate is going up – now about 35% (total) of the younger generation has a college degree.  That’s a whopping 75% increase in the number of people with degrees.

Great news, right?

Oh, heavens, no.

Part of the problem is that the population isn’t really getting smarter.

If you look at the average SAT verbal score, it’s going downhill.  I would guess that at least part of that is there are more people taking the SAT than before – it’s not just the top 35%, it’s now the top 50%, so the data implies that we’re regressing to the mean with people going to college.  There is even evidence that the population is getting (overall) dumber on a worldwide basis.

SAT scores peaked about the time that Nacho Cheese Doritos™ were introduced.  Coincidence?  I think not.  Graph via Zero Hedge

I’d suggest that most college degrees today are . . . not particularly worthwhile.

Previously, even a degree in a subject without a lot of economic demand, say, Anthropology, would indicate that you were in the top fifth of the population as far as the ability to commit to a goal for four years or more.  Now it’s more than a third of the population that has a degree.  For your degree to mean something today in 2018, the degree has to be in something useful.  Medieval French Art History Studies won’t really cut it for, well, almost any job outside of a museum where Ben Stiller works as a plucky night watchman.

I could keep going, but if your degree ends in the word “studies” then you don’t have a real degree.  You just spent five years and either family money or college debt (which is the worst possible debt) getting a degree that qualifies you for exactly the same number and type of job that you could have gotten without that degree, namely positions in the food services or housekeeping industries.

And that’s why this is a Wealthy Wednesday post – you want your degree to be of value to you.  Of course you want to go to college to have fun.  But the purpose of college isn’t to have fun – it’s to get a credential that allows you to 1. get a job where you can be of value to mankind, and 2. to make connections with people that can help your career down the line so you can be of value to mankind.  Since I was too dumb and not enough of a weasel to try to be friends with someone just to create an advantage for me, if you’re my friend and you’re reading this . . . it’s because you’re my friend.  I really suck at Machiavelli.

But if your goal is to find a job where you can be of value to mankind (and using the scorekeeper as dollars, which is a pretty relevant scorekeeper) – people are generally (though not always) paid more when they impact more human lives.  If, as an engineer, you can help everyone in the world save a nickel a day?  Wow.  You’ve managed to change the world – and you get more money.  Hence the people (like Bill Gates) who have saved literally billions of hours of mankind’s time?  Yeah, he’s got the cash from that, plus the khakis.  And a manservant who can kill you in 347 different ways with a hotel coffee machine.

The current list of top college majors to make good money (LINK from salary.com – it’s a slow-loading slideshow, so I don’t recommend it) is:

1. IT – yes, they are the wizards that support our FaceBorg® addiction. Thankfully, they have no idea of the power they wield – the power of the Search History.  Yikes!
2. Economics – this was a bit skewed – all the job titles were successful economists, managers and stuff, not the economics majors you see working at Starbucks® or playing no holds barred ping pong in Ding Dang with their lives on the line.
3. Engineer – Also skewed, but downward. They picked next to entry level positions.  The average is much higher, and this should be number one or two.  Why?  You can live without aluminum, baby, but not without engineers.
4. Math – I met a math graduate when I was in college. He was working at a bookstore.  Selling me books.  Call me dubious.
5. Marketing – Again, skewed – these were all “Marketing Director” type positions, of which there might be one in a company, and not all the marketing drones that end up giving free shots of Jägermeister® to drunken college girls on spring break in Florida.   Maybe they figured in the perks.
6. HR – It’s always good to be the group that figures out what everyone in the company should be paid. And to know where all the bodies are buried.  In some cases literally.  Career tip:  remember HR works for the company, and NOT the employees.  They will bury your career for another 0.1% annual raise.
7. English – I call bogus. I speak English.  They don’t give a degree in the language that you speak.
8. Biology – Seems legit. But they have squishy things that are made of slime in their labs.  No thanks.

And that’s the job market today.

That’s the rub – the job market today doesn’t look like the job market from forty years ago, and none of it resembles the job market from 100 years ago.  Forty years ago, to put up a bridge a group of engineers would spend thousands of hours working calculate the forces, stresses and angles required for the bridge to be safe.  And a good bridge can last thousands of years – Roman bridges are still in use today.

Now?  A software program analyzes the forces and stresses and optimizes the sizes of beams and trusses to make the bridge as safe an economical as possible.  The thousands of hours of engineering time that previously went into the bridge is now compressed into a (complex) software package that designs and specifies all the components of the bridge.  Now when the engineers using the software don’t know how to build a bridge, well, that bridge won’t last 1,000 years.

The point, however, is that engineering hours are being replaced by programs.  This is new.  What else is being changed in our job market?

• Attorneys: Legal research is farmed out to places like India, which sleep during the day and only come out at night to do legal research.  This research is done at a fraction of the cost of the average new law school graduate.  What will the new law school grads do?  I vote that they move to Iran and mess that place up with lawsuits.  You can’t even find a place to put nukes if they have an environmental review.
• Teachers: Why do we need one per classroom?  Why not have a group of lectures by the Tiger Woods® of lecturers supplemented by people who can answer student questions?  Also, we would give the classroom people Tasers®, because, as noted above, we ain’t getting any smarter.
• Accounting: This could be done by people in foreign countries if we trusted them with our bank account numbers.  Yeah, that always ends well.  Regardless, we can assume that this will be increasingly automated and globalized, like your mother.  (That’s not a great “your momma” joke, but I have a quota to fill, and I’m behind.)
• IT: Eventually the systems we use will be self-healing.  And we will need to bring them fresh electricity or whatever they need.  Since they’ll be self-sufficient, and also have our credit card numbers.  Expect random deliveries from Amazon to self-assemble a replacement for that bearded guy who fixes your hard drive.  He’ll still make the same jokes that involve Japanese anime that you haven’t seen.  Anime:  proving the Japanese are way more twisted than the Germans about sex things.
• HR: Will be replaced after at with HR-Bot 2000™.  Because HR still thinks “2000” sounds really cool and futuristic.  Actually, I’ve seen several HR software platforms that make it so HR can be eliminated.  Guess that will decrease the load on the company Internet.

Anime isn’t this disturbing.  It’s this disturbing times 186,000.  Just say no to Anime!

Automation will go after the higher (and lower) salaries first.  Burger floppers and attorneys and engineers.  Computers can do most of what you do already, except for the coffee drinking and peeing.  But they suck at welding.  Oh, wait!  They’re better at that than people.

I kid.  A little.

If you’re going to college and not majoring in Science, Technology, Engineering, or Math?  You’re just burning your dollars.  Or your Dad’s dollars.  And if your dad has that much money to burn, I’d like to do some networking with him on selling Amway®.  Or just writing me a check if he’s that gullible.

Hey, maybe I could turn your school into an unpaid internship.  Yeah.  Your dad only has to kick in half as much.

That will teach you two a lesson.

Because degrees are always worth it, right?  Even your degree in Sociology?  I hate to burst your bubble, but a really good STEM person will make what you make in your career in five years.  Maybe two if those stock options take off.

Wow.  I still have about five things to talk about relating to college and wealth, and I can see that maybe I’ll have to wait until next week.

Don’t worry – I can bully you then, too.

“For those regarded as warriors, when engaged in combat the vanquishing of thine enemy can be the warrior’s only concern. Suppress all human emotion and compassion.  Kill whoever stands in thy way, even if that be Lord God, or Buddha himself.  This truth lies at the heart of the art of combat.” – Kill Bill (Vol. 1)

Yeah, a great movie.  Also describes my freshman year at high school.  If you replace samurai swords with fish sticks.

I was playing a game the other day – a silly app that The Mrs. had downloaded onto a tablet.  It has (I kid you not) small children driving tanks and planes and what not while you attempt to destroy them with poison gas and bombs.  I’m not sure what the name of the game is, but I think it really should be called “War Criminal®.”  Anyway, there are several modes you can play it on, and one of them is “single life.”  Rather than “single life” being a video game about an old, sad, single bachelor eating over a sink, it refers to the number of lives the game gives you before it’s over.  Generally you start with the dozen or so lives like we humans all have, by switching to this mode the game makes you live just in a single life.  And when you’re done?  You’re done.

What I noticed when I played the game in “single life” mode was that I died much earlier than I normally lost the first of my dozen or so lives.  By playing conservatively to try to save that single life, I had actually played much worse than I normally do.  Maybe there’s a lesson in there?

Yeah, there is.

A colleague at work recently purchased a new car – the car of his dreams.  A car he keeps . . . in his garage.  He won’t take it out to drive.  Don’t get me wrong – I understand the idea of engaging in things you enjoy only sparingly to keep them special, but in this case – he just likes the car so much that he doesn’t want to risk anything happening to it.

Tracy Goss wrote a book called “The Last Word on Power.”  When I first saw the book, the title put me off.  I thought it was a book about how to get power – sort of like Machiavelli for the modern cubicle-dweller set.   But then a boss took me aside, “No, John, the book is about getting power over yourself.”  He’d actually gone to one of Ms. Goss’ training courses.  Said it was pretty powerful – powerful enough that an executive there had broken down realizing what a mess he’d made of his life.  Yikes!

He took me through the book.  It’s good – maybe I’ll review this 25 year old book sometime in the near future, but right now you can buy it at the link above.  I get no compensation if you do (or don’t) as of the time of writing this post – but that may change.  And it’s not likely that you’ll break down into a puddle reading it.

Anyhow.

Goss writes about samurai – and why they were awesome.  The swords, right?  Or the hair?  Or the armor?  Or the ability to turn into smoke and fly like a bat?  No, that’s ninja-vampires, not samurai.  I always get them confused.  Ninja-vampires are the ones that look like raccoons, right?  Maybe not . . . .

The real samurai (not my ninja-vampire-raccoon thing) were especially effective as fighters simply because they didn’t care if they lived or died.  They would prefer to live, but if they could die a really glorious and Tarantino-esque death, that might even be better and more honorable than living.  When the samurai went into battle, they were awesome precisely because they didn’t care.  Oh, and the swords, and the years and years of arduous and intense physical training.  But without the attitude, they would have just been a group of robed acrobats with cool swords who ran like sissies anytime they cut their own finger and saw blood.

From the time when the French Foreign Legion showed up on your newsstand every week, between manning remote outposts facing sudden death . . . .

Goss continues with her military metaphors – bringing up the French Foreign Legion.  For those of you unfamiliar with the Foreign Legion, it is open to foreign soldiers joining – even today, 75% of the soldiers in the Foreign Legion are not French (all officers are French).  The Foreign Legion is world renowned for its bravery.  One reason?  Traditionally the men who have joined the Foreign Legion have given up their home nationality, their history, and, in some cases, even abandoned their name as they joined to avoid angry fathers, husbands, or juries.

Here’s Frank Sinatra in his Foreign Legion outfit, along with his son, future president Bill Clinton.

How amazing was the Foreign Legion?  In Mexico in 1863, the Foreign Legion became legends (from Wikipedia® – edited to remove parts of the autism):

A company led by Captain Jean Danjou, numbering 62 Legionnaires and 3 Legion officers, was escorting a convoy to the besieged city of Puebla when it was attacked and besieged by three thousand Mexican loyalists.  The Legion detachment made a stand in the Hacienda de la Trinidad – a farm near the village of Camarón (JOHN WILDER NOTE:  I THINK THIS MEANS SHRIMP).  When only six survivors remained, out of ammunition, a bayonet assault was launched in which three of the six were killed. The remaining three wounded men were brought before the Mexican commander Colonel Milan, who allowed them to return to the French lines as an honor guard for the body of Captain Danjou. The captain had a wooden hand, which was later returned to the Legion and is now kept in a case in the Legion Museum, and paraded annually. It is the Foreign Legion’s most precious relic.

So, 90% of your men – dead.  Surrounded by 3,000 Mexicans.  What do you do?  Fix bayonets and charge.  All six of you.

When I was a freshman in college, Caller ID hadn’t been invented.  We called the local bowling alley:

Juvenile Us:  “Do you have 12 pound balls?”

Bowling Alley Dude:  “Yes.”

Juvenile Us:  “Then how do you walk.”

Bowling Alley Dude:  “I don’t.  I strut.”

Yes.  This really happened.

This is his hand, along with some drawings of the event.  Totally tough dudes, and they still have the hand – it’s not lost in a desk drawer or a moving box like it would be if it were in my house.

And even though the six Foreign Legion guys didn’t work in a bowling alley, they could certainly strut – they had displayed amazing, bowling-ball-sized bravery.  How?

Surrounded by 3,000 Mexicans – they attacked.  They knew that they were dead.  They were living on borrowed time.  So they did the only thing they could – they made the most out of every last second.

We tossed it out.  As soon as it started the blackmail notes.  Which were not written in English, but were written in mouse blood.

We have an awful, awful cat.  It started out as an inside cat, but was such a mess (evil in more than the usual cat way) that it became an outside cat.  One night The Mrs. and I pulled up in the Wildermobile®.  We saw our awful, awful cat outside.  It had a mouse.  The mouse was totally alive.  The cat was torturing it – allowing it to think that maybe, just maybe, it would live.

The cat had the mouse between both of its front paws – the mouse was on its back.  Evil Cat moved its paws away.  Rather than run, this mouse jumped up and bit the cat on the nose – hanging on until the cat managed to shake it off.  I hate most mice, but I really love that one mouse.

The mouse didn’t get away.

But you’re not a samurai facing other samurai.  Or a member of the French Foreign Legion facing insurmountable odds at an isolated desert outpost.  Or my friend at work who won’t take his dream car out on the road (and, I’ve given him crap about that, so I’m not tattling on him on the internet).

Yup, best decision ever.

I’ve tried to make this point before – and I’ll keep doing it – we don’t have much time on Earth, but we act like we have forever if we’re only careful enough.  And being too careful . . . it ensures that we achieve far less than we are capable of.  Yes, charging 3,000 Mexicans with your five best friends is a sure way to die.

But half of those Legionnaires did live.  And they lived a life of glory – they ran at the guns and lived.  They didn’t shy away from destiny – and an entire nation – not their nation – reveres them to this day.

I often make this point, and during future posts will probably make it again:  We are all living on borrowed time.  Each second on this planet is one less second we’ll have in the future.  Don’t wish your life away.  Don’t settle for spending time with your nose in an iPhone® MyFace© feed.  When we amuse ourselves with our media, we are using time we could have been achieving . . . amusing ourselves.

Thankfully, we all have kitties so we don’t have to worry about our impending doom or the lack of achievement in our lives (warning – has one use of the “f” word):

“Alright you Primitive Screwheads, listen up! You see this?  This is my boomstick!  The twelve-gauge double-barreled Remington.  S-Mart’s top of the line.  You can find this in the sporting goods department.  That’s right, this sweet baby was made in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  Retails for about a hundred and nine, ninety five.  It’s got a walnut stock, cobalt blue steel, and a hair trigger.  That’s right.  Shop smart.  Shop S-Mart.  You got that?” – Army of Darkness

Yes, these are the grooviest underwear in the world.  And yes, I wear them all the time.

The world truly is a web – it’s very interconnected in ways that are obvious (snowy airports slow down planes and mess up your travel plans due to Cleveland.  Cleveland!) to less obvious (gold drops in price during a stock market crash because all asset classes are impacted) to obscure and sometimes counterintuitive ways (a drop in men’s underwear sales indicates a huge drop in discretionary spending and a commensurate rise in skidmarks).

When I was younger, it seemed like the economy was tied to regions – the south might be doing well while the west was in an economic slump.  One time we had a family stop in our driveway to ask for a cup of flour so they could make gravy at a campfire as they drove from some backwater southern state to California.  Pa Wilder got them a cup of flour and some other things, canned goods and such – the little girls in the back of that beat-up car looked very small as their parents struggled to find an opportunity that would give them a future.  (Yes, that image has always haunted me – I’ll never know how that story turned out.)

More recently, the national economy of the US has acted more like a single unit and less like a group of regions.  Part of the explanation for “why” is banking.  The world we live in now of large banks crossing state borders is relatively new.  Banks, previously, had been firewalled and your account wasn’t with CitiFargo®, it was with a specific bank building in a specific town.  One time I had to cash a check in a major metropolitan area (I was quite young).  I tried to cash it at a bank with the same “name” – but it turned out that unless I went to the “main” bank the check was written to, I could not cash the check (for whatever reason I needed cash, not a check).

So, instead of hundreds of banks acting independently, we’ve created a small number of ever larger banks (the top three banks in the United States have over $6.5 trillion in capital – more capital than the next twelve in size have, and almost as much money as the US government spends on cream cheese each year) and these very large banks operate nationwide.  So, rather than having your loan denied by the local banker, an algorithm in a computer in a databank in New York denies your loan.  I’m kidding.  If you’re breathing, you can get a loan.  Take as much as you want.  We’ve got your children, too, right?

Now the economy, and the loans, move more as a unit.  Other pressures creating the web include the increasing specialization and centralization of manufacturing across the globe.  Today, more goods are manufactured farther away from their final use point than at any point in history, increasing the economic connections across the world – over 50,000 (not a typo) factories closed in the first decade of this century in the United States.

Those global trade connections create immense wealth as trade flows across the world, but they also create a significant risk that’s never existed before – the idea that economic activity in China could devastate the United States, or vice versa.  It may sound far-fetched, but the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy coupled with food aid programs plus ethanol’s mandated use as a gasoline additive led to the Arab Spring and the current civil war in Syria.

Huh?

Yeah.

The Federal Reserve, in order to stimulate the economy of the United States, dumped massive amounts of money from helicopters.  Just kidding.  They gave it to their friends.  Anyway, this massive dump, known as Quantitative Easing, caused the prices of food to go up everywhere in the world, especially in the Middle East.  And food aid programs (along with geography) actually lower the number of people engaged in farming.  How is that?  Well, if you farm and do really well in Egypt, you have to compete with free grain dumped in Africa.  How do you compete against free?  You don’t.  But since the United States started mandating that ethanol be added to gasoline, it’s lowered the amount of food available.  Why?  Because the only way to make ethanol is to use stuff we could either eat or feed to some nice fat cow to make steaks.

It sucks to be Egyptian.  It sucks more to be Egyptian when the prices of food go out of sight.  The result of hungry, angry people?  Rebellion, revolution.  It’s ongoing in Syria.  And it’s certain that over 500,000 people have died in the various conflicts after the “Arab Spring,” which was brought about . . . due to economic policy, “free” food, and food turned into car fuel.

Pulling at one bit of yarn in the sweater will end up unravelling the whole sweater – it’s all made of the same yarn.  The global economy is similarly connected.  And in order to make it more profitable, we’ve made it more efficient.  Efficiency is good, right?  Sure!  The factory goes from one shift to three, and produces almost three times as much stuff if it goes 24 hours per day.  But by doing that, if we lose that factory, we’ve lost three times as much production as if we’d done it inefficiently.  A natural consequence of efficiency is higher profits.  A side effect of efficiency is higher overall risk – the system is working at nearly full capacity, so the loss of any significant component places the system in deficit.  There’s a shortage somewhere if the system runs into trouble.

That explains why the two Gulf Wars brought about huge price increases in oil – the system had to raise prices to allocate the oil to the most important (or richest) users and the world oil production system simply does not have “instant” capacity that can be added – the lag between supply and demand is measured in years.  The price of oil acted as a retardant on the rest of the economy – a friction.  Like a tax, it raised the price of everything that required energy to produce and ship – in short, all material goods were impacted, but nice sunsets were still free.  Businesses that lived at the margin of profitability disappeared.  Men’s underwear sales went down – yes, this is literally the last thing that gets purchased in tough times – no matter how bad, you can always wear the underwear another week (skidmarks and all).

But failed businesses don’t pay a paycheck.  And newly unemployed people don’t eat out (or buy underwear) – even McDonalds® sales plummeted during the last big recession.  And so McDonalds© doesn’t hire people.  Those people don’t go to eat out, either.  It’s failure.  But it’s a failure that leads from one failure to the next, like dominos knocking each other over – something nerds call “cascading failure.”

How bad was the last recession?  Certain sales in basic chemical precursors . . . stopped.  Credit dried up – why would you lend to someone who might be going bankrupt?

Here are some actual examples that I was aware of during the 2008-2011 collapse . . .

• At some point – sulfuric acid production in the United States . . . stopped. Sulfuric acid is known as the “king of chemicals” because so many, many things depend upon it, like The Mrs.’ glass eye or her prosthetic leg.  I know one producer of sulfur stopped producing for over a month.  Why?  No one would buy sulfur – at any price.
• Rail cars stopped being useful. On my 18 mile drive to work, I passed by (mainly) open line railroad.  There were a few miles of siding (siding is the place where they switch cars).  I noticed that the siding began to fill up.  And it filled up further.  Pretty soon there were miles (literally miles) of railroad cars sitting – not moving.  Not moving any product.

What happened?  We ended up putting 480 volts through the heart of the American economy with borrowed money and jumpstarting Frankenstein back to life.  I’m not sure that we can do that again.  The debts are higher.  The excesses are greater.  The PEZ™ supply is at a 20 year low.

Thankfully, they still ship ammo by mail.  And I’ve got some really great underwear that will probably last for a long time.  Does your underwear have chainsaws, shotguns, skulls and “groovy” on it?

Yeah, I didn’t think so.