Category: Wealth

Welcome To The Exponential, Including One Bikini Graph

“If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” – No Country For Old Men

When I went to Ireland I met some shy people, which surprised me.  No one expects the Irish inhibition.

I had noticed it some time ago a strange mathematical relationship – the National Debt (sort of) doubles about every eight years.  Is it an exact mathematical relationship?  Nope.  It varies a bit based on which eight years that you pick.  But the relationship is simple – the national debt is growing faster than yeast in AOC’s armpits, at about 9% per year.

It wasn’t always like that.

I also looked at the national debt between World War II and 1970 or so.  During that time period, the national debt was as flat as Joe Biden’s brain activity scan.  Hmm, whatever could have happened around 1970?

You’ll be happy to know that my search for “Richard Nixon bikini” came up empty.

The reason for most of our problems is that understanding the idea of exponential growth is difficult.  Our minds are (mostly) made for understanding linear things, or things that happen slowly.  No one really expects that, no matter how badly they eat, that they’d double in weight overnight, or even over the course of a month or year.

Yet, a lot of natural processes do follow exponentials, at least for a limited amount of time.  Take a baby.  Please.  I really have no use for them anymore.  Even the thought of a baby makes me exhausted.

Babies start with one cell, then two, then four, and then eight, and so on.  The initial growth of a child is exponential.  Thankfully, that levels off, or else there would be no way that I’d be able to afford to feed Pugsley.  If that exponential growth rate had continued, he’d be the size of the Solar System and need to eat cheeseburgers the size of Saturn just to make it to lunch.

Want fries with that Saturn?

No.  He’ll settle for the rings.

So, exponentials can’t continue on forever.  Math proves that.  If exponentials could continue forever, by the year 2032, the only blog left on the Internet would be this one, and everyone on Earth would have to spend 18 hours a day reading it.

Ahhh, I can dream.

But our national debt is following that trend.  Here’s a graph I put together:

Actual conversation with The Mrs.:  I said, “I promise I can make this [economic idea] interesting.”  The Mrs. responded, “Bikini graphs aren’t interesting to me.”

One of the lines is the actual national debt.  It’s the red one.  I just picked actual national debt data every eight years going into the past from today.  The other one?  I extrapolated back into the past from today: I just assumed that the national debt doubled every eight years.

How accurate was I?

In 1973 the actual national debt was $466 billion.  My backwards approximation?  $438 billion.  Close enough that a snake that was 3.14 feet long could be called a πthon.

Sure, in the middle, sometimes I was higher, sometimes lower.  But in general, I stuck the landing.

That means that in 2029 (if the United States is made of math) that we’ll be seeing a national debt of $56 trillion.  And in 2037?  $112 trillion.  Jeff Bezos sometimes works a whole year and doesn’t make that much money.

I heard he didn’t want to be CEO or president, just Prime® minister.

Does it make sense to anyone that the world will still keep accepting a doubling of debt every eight years and still keep sending us oil and steel and copper for the dollars that we print?  Sure, it worked for a long time.  Having an unmatched military and all the nukes gives a lot of room to dictate terms.

But how many people remember back to 1980 when the winner of the Cold War was in doubt?  The United States couldn’t print all of the dollars it wanted to without inflation.  The rule that the dollar followed changed, though, when the Soviet Union decided that it wanted to retire and spend the rest of eternity in Boca Raton in a retirement community gumming applesauce.

After that, the United States printing press could go wild.  Inflation?  Well, why bother with that?  The United States could print all the money it wanted and ship it overseas.  What else were people going to want?  Rubles?  Marks?  Rupees?

No.  The way that international trade was done was with the dollar.  We could print them up, and the world would soak them up and then the inflation could be exported all over the world, since the demand for dollars was now the entire world.  The United States could, in essence, tax the entire world to allow them to use the good old dollar.

I heard my chiropractor owes back taxes.

It was a good ride.  Need oil?  Print a few billion and send it to the Saudis.  Need copper?  Print a few million and send it to Chile.  Need cars?  Print a few billion and send it to Japan.

There are good things that happen when you win it all.  You get a trophy.  You get a party.  You get oil and copper and cars.  But if you have too much fun at the party?

There’s always the hangover.

Exponential growth can continue, and it can continue for quite a long time.  Without it, life itself wouldn’t be possible.  But life proves, again and again, that there is only so far that growth can go.

But, hey, it’s different this time, right?  The national debt can go on forever, right?

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: The Cold Civil War?

“You didn’t bring a gun to the final shoot-out?” – Seven Psychopaths

This month the clocks were supposed to go back, but I forgot where I bought mine.

  1. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
  2. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
  3. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
  4. Open War.

March was had increased violence as the country warmed up.  Sadly for the Left, none of the violence measured up to their requirements – they were looking for very specific circumstances.  They needed a white guy with an AR-15 killing four or more people, kids if possible.  The Left was disappointed.  All of their lottery violence tickets turned out to be of the wrong ethnicity, and then they were immediately disappeared from the news.  Poof.

I’m holding March at “just” a 9 out of 10.  That’s still two minutes to midnight.

I currently put the total at (this is my best approximation, since no one tracks the death toll from rebellion-related violence) holding at 650 out of the 1,000 required for the international civil war definition.

As close as we are to the precipice of war, be careful.  Things could change at any minute.  Avoid crowds.

In this issue:  Front Matter – The Cold Civil War – Violence And Censorship Update – Enter The Leftist Panopticon – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Running The Gun Gauntlet – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month.  I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues.  Also, feel free to subscribe and you’ll get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30 Eastern, free of charge.

The Cold Civil War

Loudoun County, Virginia – A group of school staff and elected officials formed a Facebook® group:  the “Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County”, which sounds nice enough, I guess.  What they were doing was, however, the opposite of nice.  They were plotting how to publicly destroy people who differ with their ideology.  You can read about the details here (LINK).

The Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County primary spokesthing, Jabba The Teacher.

What was the difference?  The “Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County” believe strongly in Marxist societal division theory Critical Race Theory (CRT).  If you haven’t read much about CRT, I can assure you that CRT is 100% a collectivist’s dream.  The laundry list of things that CRT advocates is pretty rough:

  • Dismantling merit-based systems
  • Removing rationality
  • Removing legal equality and Constitutional and legal race-neutrality
  • “Naming one’s own reality” – as in “My Truth” and not The Truth
  • Reparations, and nationalism (but only for non-whites)
  • And a lot of other things

In most bullet-point lists, I throw in a few silly ones just for fun.  Not in the list above, since almost everything that CRT stands for is very, very silly.

But here is a case of a group of Leftists wanting to destroy people because they don’t want them to judged by, apparently, their spelling:

Yup, this is real.  She can’t spell the name of her school (LINK) and goes from third person to first person in the same sentence. 

This is cancer in our country.  CRT is specifically designed to create division.  It is working.  The scariest part of this is that a group of publicly paid teachers and elected officials have set up a secret club to publicly destroy parents who disagree with them philosophically.

Welcome to the Cold Civil War.

 

Violence And Censorship Update

The biggest story in censorship this month is the censoring by Amazon® of the book When Harry Became Sally by Ryan T. Anderson.  The reason?  “Amazon™ has “chosen not to sell books that frame LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness.”

Now, since one study showed that 41% of transgender folks had attempted suicide, well, there is at least an argument that mental illness may be at play in some cases of transgenderism.  That’s a weak statement, and almost certainly true.  Yet, Amazon© wouldn’t allow that to be published in 2021.

What message does that send to a writer?  More importantly, what information does that send to a publisher?  Since Amazon™ sells between 50% and 80% of the books sold in the United States, would a major publisher take a chance on ideas that Amazon© might find objectionable?

No.

And it’s looking like YouTube™ wants to remove the “dislike” button.  Why?  There are several theories, but one that amuses me the most is that Joe Biden’s handlers are upset that whenever he has a video out, that the dislikes overwhelmingly swamp the people who hit the “like” button.  The comments are already turned off.

I built an IKEA® bookcase I called Joe.  It was pretty shaky and leaned hard to the Left.

In YouTube©’s latest idea, the “dislike” button will still be there, and you can still use it.  The video creator can see the number of dislikes, too.  So, if it’s an anti-bullying campaign, it’s the stupidest one ever because the bullied person can still see how many people don’t like them.

I’ll note that in the videos I reviewed for this post, none of them have comments available.

They know you don’t like them.  They know what you think of them.  They just don’t want other people to be able to see it.

Enter The Leftist Panopticon:

There was a creepy English guy named Jeremy Bentham who was a “social” thinker in 18th century England.  One of his inventions was a prison.  The idea that Jeremy had was a prison where just a few guards could look and see everyone at once.  This panopticon was a prison where you were never really free of the gaze of the guards.

Welcome to 2021, so we have to be able to do better than that, right?

If Donald Trump had indicated that he was going to use government money to hire private companies to scour social media to find people that opposed him, and use the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to run the program, Elon Musk would have been able to hear the Leftist outcry from his pleasure palace on Mars.

On the plus side, I’m thinking my FBI agent is happy as I make those small, but necessary changes to better my life.

But swap out the name to “Joe Biden” and there has been remarkably little negative comment.  Have a need to update the No-Fly™ list with pesky people from the Right?

Go for it.  And here’s the (LINK) to prove I’ve not been making this up after watching too much Alex Jones.

The Left will certainly do it.  And it won’t be limited to recent ideas, either.  The way that Leftists feel about the Right is simple:  if you ever, ever supported something the Left is against now?  You’re a heretic.  Cancelled.

Do you expect the DHS to be any different now they’re in the hands of the Left?

We have entered an era of technology where every move that you make can be tracked.  I noticed this on my phone when I stopped at a new restaurant.  Google® popped up with, “Hey, can you tell us if this restaurant has any typographical errors on the menu?”  Google’s® A.I. was asking little old me to help it know absolutely everything about everyplace.

That same Google® data was used and cross-referenced to bring charges against people who were in the Capitol on January 6, 2021.  This data went from, “we can’t use” to “we won’t use” to “we will use” in just a few years.  It’s now a primary tool for law enforcement.

As will be your friends, your email, your web history, your web search history, and, soon enough, a track of you moving from camera to camera in any urban space.

The Civil War 2.0 implication is this:  the Left is using this information actively.  Act accordingly.

Updated Civil War II Index

The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real-time.  They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings.  As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that lead to the index.  On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

Violence:

Up is more violent, and violence is up in March.  I expect it to jump in April.  If Chauvin is found not guilty?  Through the roof.  The state-media propaganda of “home grown terrorism” is increasing the public perception of violence at this point.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable.  Instability is near record levels, as the Right doesn’t believe in President *, and the Left wants to cancel the Right.

Economic:

I expected this number to be more positive.  It’s not.  I think we will find that April is the month that we find that inflation moves from a thought to a widely-felt reality.

Illegal Aliens:

This data is at record levels for this time of year.  Comments from the Left?  “There needs to be more.”

Running The Gun Gauntlet

I had predicted that the ludicrous Sheila Jackson-Lee bill for gun control would be dead on arrival.  I was right.  But the other bills keep moving along and are a lot more likely to pass.

They’re smaller bills.  Increasing the number of background checks by making almost all transactions require background checks.  There’s a “family exemption” that soon enough will become a “family loophole” after the appropriate victim and shooter combination is found.

Guns don’t kill people, Democratic voters kill people.

In reality, there’s no way to track these background checks, since a very large number of guns in existence have absolutely no paperwork of any type connecting them to their current owner.  After the background checks don’t stop gun violence, the call will come for a national gun registry so that ownership can be tracked.

Registration at the Federal level won’t happen, because people won’t register.  Okay, some would.  But most won’t.  When Connecticut tried to get “assault” weapons registered, it is assumed that only one weapon out of eight was registered.  People know what is at stake.

Doing all of this at once is too much, and too far.  The average American gun owner simply will not comply with registration in 2021, and even the stupidest Leftist understands that widespread noncompliance just gives people a reason to understand the relative strength of individuals and the relative weakness of the government.

As I’ve said before on another post (LINK), the largest army that the world has ever seen are the 80,000,000+ members of the Right in the United States.  As soon as the Right realizes that, they will understand that we truly are only ruled by our consent.

And that is truly what the Left fears.

LINKS

As usual, links this month are courtesy of Ricky.  Thanks so much!!

The MSM narrative remains fragmented.

The Alt-Right Civil War

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/30/jan-6-capitol-riot-jail-time-478440

https://www.opb.org/article/2021/03/28/proud-boys-clash-with-anti-fascists-in-salem/

https://wwmt.com/news/local/fbi-testifies-wolverine-watchmen-were-trying-to-instigate-a-second-civil-war

https://www.newsweek.com/pastor-rick-joyner-urges-american-christians-prepare-civil-war-1576570

https://napavalleyregister.com/opinion/letters/trump-s-undeclared-civil-war/article_16821682-efae-5831-868b-a239815747ba.html

https://napavalleyregister.com/opinion/letters/the-real-civil-war/article_6c453064-39db-5540-949e-e8f9dfd071be.html

The Republican Civil War

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/03/31/cold-civil-war-being-waged-republicans

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/3/29/a-cold-civil-war-is-being-waged-in-america

https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-next-battle-for-american-democracy-is-around-the-corner-and-moderates-must-be-in-the-fight/

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2021/4/1/22356594/conservatives-right-wing-democracy-claremont-ellmers

The Black Civil War

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/04/the-many-lives-of-grandmaster-jay/618408/

https://allhiphop.com/features/the-nfacs-grand-master-jay-speaks-out-on-legal-status-hip-hop-freedom-and-the-future/

https://www.msnbc.com/craig-melvin/watch/-it-means-that-you-re-preparing-yourself-to-defend-yourself-nfac-leader-on-militia-name-meaning-108925509977

https://news.yahoo.com/inside-look-black-militia-group-110636647.html

https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/armed-protesters-in-douglasville-were-peaceful-sheriff-says

The Armed Forces Civil War

https://www.defense.gov/Explore/News/Article/Article/2542699/seac-dod-will-move-fast-against-extremism-after-completion-of-stand-downs/

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/03/19/some-troops-see-capitol-riot-blm-protests-similar-threats-top-enlisted-leader-says.html

https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2021/03/29/civilian-employee-who-allegedly-advocated-for-civil-war-banned-from-air-force-base/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/aaronsmith/2021/04/01/gun-sales-soar-from-stimulus-and-bidens-gun-control-plan-amid-mass-shootings/?sh=378c7e866020

https://slate.com/technology/2021/02/3d-printed-semi-automatic-rifle-fgc-9.html

https://www.amestrib.com/story/news/2021/03/25/iowa-state-isu-students-emailed-3-d-printed-guns-day-after-boulder-mass-shooting-colorado/6995202002/

https://www.19fortyfive.com/2021/03/could-the-u-s-ban-guns-australia-tried-something-pretty-close/

 

The American Civil War

https://www.aier.org/article/the-end-of-america/

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17179/hr1-for-the-people

https://wirepoints.org/mass-federalization-how-washington-is-bailing-out-failed-states-decapitating-competitive-ones-and-ending-america-as-you-knew-it-wirepoint

https://www.persuasion.community/p/john-mcwhorter-the-neoracists

https://thecritic.co.uk/schools-gone-woke/

A Brief Guide To Human Action – Which Leads To Human Freedom

“They say you’re a man of vision.  Is that true?” – Lonesome Dove

I’ll never forget Pa Wilder’s last words:  “Find a woman that holds you as tight as Nancy Pelosi holds a vodka bottle.”

(John Wilder note:  Please read this post all the way through because I think you’ll find this one of the most useful posts that I’ve put together.)

Ludwig Von Mises is was an economist.  His pronouns are dead/buried.  The sure sign of the best economists is that they’re dead, because then they can’t ask to be paid for being wrong all of the time.

One thing that Von Mises left us with was a book called Human Action.  Really, it wasn’t a book, it was him sitting at his typewriter and generating a 400-page doorstop like he was getting paid by the punctuation mark.  I read some of it back in my more libertarian days.  Dry doesn’t begin to describe it – after completing two hundred pages you become as desiccated as King Tut’s armpit.

Thankfully, the main ideas of Human Action are quite powerful and also pretty simple.  And, it won’t take me 400 pages to get to the point.  Von Mises created a model of human action where he states that each and every voluntary human action requires three things:

A Vision Of A Better State:  For example, me having a beer.  If it was Friday, I might consider that having a beer would be a better state than not having a beer.  In most cases, the vision is based not on cold, logical thought, but on emotion.

A Path To Get To A Better State:  It just so happens that there’s a beer in the fridge, so if I got my sorry butt off of the couch, I could walk over and get one.

A Belief That Action Will Really Lead To A Better State:  I really and honestly believe that I could walk to the fridge and get a beer, since I deactivated the trap door that leads to the alligator pit.

How many economists does it take to fix a lightbulb?  Don’t know, they’re still arguing over why the last one broke.

In my example, I started off with a Vision first.  That’s one way that action can occur, but not the only way.  The three necessary conditions can really come in any order.  I might have a pile of lumber and a saw and a hammer.  So, I have a Path.  I have Belief that I could build something out of wood since I’m okay at building stuff out of wood (just okay, not great).  After thinking about it, I decide to build a PEZ® dispenser sized for PEZ© the size of cinder blocks with an articulated carved Anne Coulter head so her jaw can open as wide as a python’s.  In this example, my Vision of a better state (and need for a really big spring) came last.

I’ve found when analyzing the actions I personally take, a truism:  if all three of the Human Action requirements are met – Vision, Path, and Belief – then my action is guaranteed.  Likewise, if even one of them is missing, nothing (and I mean nothing) happens.

This model is useful to use when people that you’re working with aren’t doing what you want them to.  Analyze the situation:  which of the three elements of the Human Action model are missing?

People in business have been using this model on you for as long as you have lived.  Think of a typical car commercial:

  • Vision: Buy a Mustang® so hot chicks in bikinis will like me and want to pat my bald head.  See!  They’re patting the bald head of that man on the commercial!
  • Path: Go to the dealer and buy one, they have tons of them.
  • Belief: Hey, zero percent financing and no credit check.  They’re giving the money away so I can buy one!

All commercials are based on manipulating these three simple elements.  Commercials are attempting to get us to take action – or to avoid taking an action.  Most are trying to get our money, but some are trying to convince us that Steven Tyler from Aerosmith© personally cares whether or not we drive drunk.

Steven Tyler just released two books.  One’s a cookbook, and the other’s an art book:  “Wok This Way” and “Doodles Like A Lady”

Manipulation is the key to this game.  Understanding when you watch a commercial how they’re trying to change our views allows us to be on guard against that manipulation.  And, as I noted before, it is a very rare commercial that wants to appeal to logic.

Emotional manipulation is where the money is at.  The advertisers want us to use their gasoline and love it because, um, it’s more gasoline-y than the competitors?  Because it has special molecules in the gasoline that make gravy in your pistons?  Regardless, look for the emotional manipulation – it will be there.

So, we’ve saved a few bucks because we’ve kept the advertisers out of our heads.  Hurrah!  But who else is using this model?

Well, Big Government, for one.  On January 6, 2021, all the Congresscritters had at least a bit of pee in their pants.  A group of relatively aimless protestors stopped off at the Capitol to share their opinions with their elected representatives.

I was on a witness stand at a trial in Alaska, and the lawyer asked me, “Where were you on the night of November to March?”

The group’s Vision was murky.  “Walk over and complain” might be a good description.  It was certainly more peaceful than most of the George Floyd riots (and more on them in a minute).  The Path was easy – it’s not even a very far walk from their rally to the Capitol Building.  Did they have Belief that their action would allow them to “walk over and complain”?

Sure.  So they did.

But that’s not what the Congress Swamp Rats saw.  They saw a group that, with a slightly different Vision could have easily started a movement that would have ousted our current government via a revolution.  As every reader here knows (and as every Congressional Parasite knows), the rank and file of the Right are the single largest army the world has ever seen.  Even if the Right was pitiful, it could take over forty (?) state governments in 24 hours.

We are truly governed only by our consent.  Seizing power in America would be trivial if people on the Right had a Vision, a Path, and Belief that didn’t include a government more intrusive than if Google® was a proctologist and more bloated than 1977 Elvis.

That’s exactly what happened when the Berlin Wall fell.  The people suddenly had a Vision:  sexy American girls in bikinis, CD players, and not having to drive crappy commie cars anymore.  They had a Path:  tear down that Wall.  Once they had Belief?  The Wall didn’t last an afternoon.

As another Floyd, Pink Floyd© tried to metaphorically tell us, The Wall is built in our mind, brick by brick.

Communism is the noble struggle of the proletariat to overcome the problems that are only caused by communism.

Anyone who thinks the “assault” weapon grab has anything to do with “mass shooting” has bought the emotional propaganda that Big Government (along with Big Business and Big Media) is selling.  Big Government wants the guns off of the street because they are the only real threat that Big Government sees to itself and the privileges that it has given itself.

That’s why the George Floyd riots were so important to Big Government.  What were the protesters protesting for?  More Big Government, more handouts, and more government control – this time not only of our rifles that are rarely used to shoot anyone (484 people a year in the United States for all rifles, compared to 1,476 for knives and other pointy things), but also our speech, our national heritage, and even our thoughts.

The BLM riots weren’t stopped because they’re everything Big Government wants.

I started carrying a pistol after a mugging attempt.  Now my muggings are more successful.

The biggest trick the Devil tries is to convince you he isn’t real.  The biggest trick that Big Government tries is to convince you that you have no power.  But if we have no power, why are there more troops in Washington D.C. than in Afghanistan?  Big Government has set the Right as the enemy.  I assure you, they are more afraid of the 80,000,000+ people on the Right than they are of the Chinese.

Now that you know their intentions, what else is Big Government, Big Media, and Big Business trying to make citizens feel?

Does this change your Vision, Path, and Belief?

When It Comes To Economics, Karl Missed The Marx

“It was a Russian ship. They taught me all about you imperialist swine. I was exposed to the works of great thinkers - Karl Marx, Lenin, L. Ron Hubbard, Freddie Laker.” – Top Secret

Pa Wilder wouldn’t let me date girls who ran in track.  He didn’t want me hanging around with fast women.

One of the advantages of writing these posts are the times when my family will ask me what I’m writing about.  They’re not reading it, of course, but it’s always a good conversation starter and it gets me off of the topics of “Why isn’t the trash out?” and “Who is going clean the lint from between Dad’s toes?”  Tonight Pugsley was the one who took one for the team was interested.

“What are you typing about tonight, Dad?”  He knows that as a writer I’m a fair typist.

“Well, it’s about economics and bad ideas.  Probably one of the worst ideas ever.”

“What was it, Cheetos-flavored Chapstick®?  Crystal Pepsi™?”

I gave The Mrs. Gorilla Glue® Lip Balm.  That left her speechless.

“Well, one economist in particular had some pretty bad ideas.  He had the idea that the things we made were only worth the labor that went into making them – nothing more, and nothing less.”

“So what about the $200 sneakers that toddlers make in Pakistan and only cost $2 to produce?”

“Well, that’s another idea that we’ll get to, but we can use that example.  In this economist’s mind, the toddlers who made the sneaker should have made most of that $200.  He would have argued that the $198 profit in the sneakers was exploiting the worker.”

Of course we were talking about Karl Marx.  Although he wasn’t the first one to embrace the “Labor Theory of Value”, this horrible idea was used to make more people miserable than the Kardashians ever have.

The biggest flaw inherent in the Labor Theory of Value in Marxism was the destruction of the price system.  In this case, if we had the same labor component in our sneakers and in, say, a polished piece of poo (don’t laugh, they did it on Mythbusters®) then they should cost the same.

Whoever stole my furniture polish, I will find you.  That’s my Pledge®.

Yes, shiny polished poo and fashion sneakers should cost the same to a Marxist – heck, if it took more time to make it really shiny, that would be worth more than the sneakers.  This sounds like nonsense, but the commies sold it to the revolting masses in Russia.  Why should other people make money?  The idea that they’re making a profit means you’re being cheated!

While this might have been a good strategy for children playing “store” in kindergarten or Hollywood™ stars protesting for (insert weekly cause here) it didn’t work out so well in practice.  The Labor Theory of Value caused all sorts of problems in the Soviet Union.  One of the first stories I ever heard about this is one I’ve related before – the Great Soviet Nail Failure.

The story goes like this:

A Soviet factory is told by Moscow to increase nail tonnage.  The solution?  Very large nails – one pound railroad spikes.

Obviously, the commissar in Moscow got in trouble.  The next commissar (after the first one got, umm, fired) gave a new order to the factory:  “Make lots of nails.”  So, they made thousands of tiny finish nails.  They were sad that the whole “invading Finland thing didn’t work out, or else they could have made Finnish nails.

Looks like they’re gonna need a new commissar.

I got a job at the chess factory.  I took a knight off.

While the nail story can’t be corroborated, what can be proven is that one Soviet factory produced exclusively shoes for young children with the leather they were sent.  Why?  They got a production bonus for making more pairs of shoes, regardless of if there was a need for them.

What they were missing, of course, was price.  No one sent a signal back that they made too many tiny shoes.

The entire reason for this nonsense is that profit simply didn’t exist.  You can’t have fully automated luxury communism if there aren’t prices for the things we use based on supply and demand.  Price tells factories what to make without requiring armies of bureaucrats to decide.  Failure means you lose your factory and someone smarter (or, luckier) gets it.

This is, of course, the reason that 21 year old girls are getting college degrees in Medieval Rap Lyrics.  Their labor is as good as anyone else, right?  So why don’t they get a job paying $235,000 a year with a company car and an apartment in New York and a clutch of sassy rich trampy friends?

Economics.  The highest value of labor of a 21 year old girl getting a college degree in Medieval Rap Lyrics is worth exactly as much as she can get in tips at Hooters®.  But they honestly believe that they deserve that cool job because . . . they work as hard as anyone else.

Marx would be proud.

I tried to pay for my dinner at Hooters® with an energy drink.  I guess Red Bull™ doesn’t always give you wings.

While we were talking about economics, Pugsley started getting the idea.

It turns out that Pugsley loves computers, and is really irritated.  The nice graphics cards he likes are in short supply.  First, the ‘Rona ruined the supply chain, so there are shortages up and down the line in the computer manufacturing world.

Second, high-end graphics processing cards (so they can watch the Pac-Man® in High Definition™) for computers are in really short supply.  It turns those graphics cards are they’re great for mining for cryptocurrency.  One video card with a manufacturer’s list price of $700 was going for $1,500.  The high-end graphics card is going for $3,000.  Pugsley figured that the higher-end card could pay for itself in crypto (at current prices and mining rates) in about nine months to a year.

So, yeah, it makes sense that these things cost $3,000.  Heck, at $3,000 they’re still a bargain, assuming crypto doesn’t disappear down a black hole to zero.  Which it could, because crypto is the ultimate expression of the opposite of Labor Value – every bit of crypto value is based on subjective value – it only has value because we agree it does.

So why doesn’t the manufacturer raise the price so that they can keep more of the value of their video cards?

I went to a topless Amish bar the other night.  No bonnets.

Well, in this case, their core audience is gamers, who can be very, very loyal.  Crypto mining might go away in a year or two.  But if the video card users/fans feel they’ve been robbed?  Gamers will go to the number two manufacturer.  But they still won’t have girlfriends.

The manufacturer is playing the long game.

The high prices irritate Pugsley.  Pugsley would dearly love to have a nicer graphics card, but can’t afford them at these inflated prices.  His (minor) revenge is that his graphics card is whirring away right now mining itsy-bitsy amounts of crypto.  In a small way, he’s benefiting from the whole process.

In a free market you get people who take advantage of price-mismatches like that.  Scalpers fill this role, too.  As long as they don’t cheat the system (which they often do) it’s an honest living.  Me?  I had season tickets to an NFL© team for a time.  They were doing well, and I generally doubled my money (on the games I didn’t go to) every year.  Heck, I even reported the income to the IRS.

The beauty of a transaction in a free economy is that both people win.  If I want a burger and it costs $2, well, it’s because Dairy Queen® wants the $2 more than it wants the burger.  Me?  I want the burger more than I want the $2.

Which is also what they pay for their corn.

In a free exchange, both parties win.  And if I think $2 is too much for the chewy hockey-puck burgers our Dairy Queen™ makes in Modern Mayberry?  Well, they get a signal that people aren’t buying their burgers.

Or Cheetos®-flavored Chapstick™.

Read This Post Because You Want To See Why Efficiency Can Suck

“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!  Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, and nice red uniforms – oh damn!” – Python, Monty

I’m scared that German sausage might be dangerous – but I guess that’s a wurst-case scenario.

One particular afternoon (decades ago) my ex-wife (She Who Will Not Be Named – SWWNBN) moved out.  It was one of those things where we were both immediately happier, though the process of getting a divorce was rough – the judge finally had to sit me down and tell me I couldn’t get the engagement annulled, too.

I kid.  SWWNBN and I were awful for each other.  One of the major disagreements in our life was money.  I was cheap – when SWWNBN wanted to get out of the house for dinner and I fed her Hamburger Helper® in the garage, well, SWWNBN wasn’t pleased.

So on that particular afternoon, SWWNBN moved out she handed me a plastic grocery sack.  It was filled to the brim with papers.  “Here,” she grunted as the heavy sack thudded on the dinner table, causing the legs to audibly groan, “are the bills.  And here is the checkbook.  I have no idea how much money is in it.”

SWWNBN then turned and walked out the door.  For good.

There’s a dentist office in the Vatican – it’s in the Listerine Chapel.

Let me explain how I got into this situation:  stupidity.

I had the brilliant idea when SWWNBN and I argued about money to give her control of the bills.  I figured that if she was responsible for paying them, she’d make sure that they were paid, and help economize around the house, keep the thermostat lower, turn off the lights, and understand that our income versus our bills was a constant fight to avoid trying to find the choice real estate under the overpass – but you have to remember location is everything.

SWWNBN had managed the bills for a few years.  Surely she had been competent.  I picked up the bill on top.

It was a gasoline company credit card.  It hadn’t been paid in two months.  The balance was (from memory) $780.

For gasoline.

SWWNBN had been paying the minimum balance and juggling the payments so it looked like the Titanic was doing swell, thank you very much, until the alarm went up and the crew jumped ship.

The movies The Sixth Sense and Titanic are about the same thing:  icy dead people.

The show of horrors went on as I went through the stack and started sorting them into piles:

  • Paid and up to date (one account, the mortgage was in this stack).
  • Only one or two months late.
  • Late and building a ludicrous balance.
  • Company threatening to send people named Vito and Chico to break my legs.

I then went to my computer and opened Excel®.  I started making a spreadsheet.  The bills were enormous.  In order to not have to “donate” a kidney to someone from the United Arab Emirates, my one option was to take an immediate loan against my 401K.

The next 24 months of my life were an exercise in extreme budget management.  Every single expense was an exercise in nearly zero choices:  every cent had a home before my company direct-deposited it into my account.  How close was I budgeting things?  By the time I was through with a five-dollar bill, Abe was clean-shaven.

My pay had become exactly coupled to my expenses.

Did you hear about that movie role Nic Cage turned down?  Neither did he.

When people think of efficiency, they describe, for instance, a manufacturing facility where all of the equipment is used at maximum capacity, all the time.  Whatever is being made flows from one process to the next and there’s no lag.  All of the processes are coupled.  There is no slack in the system.

This is, of course, a recipe for disaster.

Just like my income being exactly tied to the seemingly endless stack of bills that I had to pay, that kind of factory would bring nothing but chaos.  Whenever any part of it had to slow down or stop unless there was a place to put the “in progress” work, the entire factory would have to shut down or Lucy would have to eat a lot more chocolates.

My life was just like that factory.  If the dollar didn’t come in, I couldn’t pay my bills.  If I had been out of work for even a few months, I would have been bankrupt.  At least if I was bankrupt in summer, I might get some prime real estate in the stormwater culvert.

The example factory isn’t something I’ve made up.  If you look at the outages of natural gas and electricity during the February storm, you’ll see a system where all of the excess capacity had been used.  In colder climates, the systems are built for the cold.  In Texas?

Not so much.  The excess capacity for electrical generation (in some cases) was down for maintenance as pointed out by Nick Flandrey (his website) in the comments section here.

And it would be difficult to convince a business executive to build a lot of excess capacity for the coldest winter storm to hit Texas in over 120 years.  If there’s excess capacity, that executive will try to figure out a way to use it.  His career and BMW® payments require it, although I still feel sorry for that poor German that installs turn signals on BMWs™.

Excess isn’t tolerated – it’s not efficient.  Not a lot of polar bears use sunblock.

But don’t worry about teddy bears.  They’re already stuffed.

But in resilient systems, the excess isn’t just tolerated – it’s required.  There is a conscious decoupling from one operation to the next.  These are systems that are built to be reliable.  Part of our jobs as adults is to scan the horizon as hard as Joe Biden works when he tries to form a complete sentence to see where those breakdowns might occur.

Decoupling is required for many things – the very idea of prepping, for instance, is a conscious act to decouple from a fragile, efficient system.  Building up excess capacity (food, ammo, water purification, heat, shelter) is that very act of creating slack.  It’s building up space between your car and the idiot in front of you in case they hit the brakes on a wet road and you rear-end them and realize you’re underinsured and then they complain about neck pains and then say just kidding and this just got far too specific.

So, back to me, decades ago, sitting in a chair at a dining room table staring at a pile of bills.  Knowing that a truck had pulled into my life and as the bed went up, it had covered me up so deep that only a farmer could pull me out, since he knew that I wouldn’t make the soil richer.

And I dug out of debt, bit by bit, bill by bill.  When I retired a bill was a time of great joy.  And, the first one I paid off was that gasoline credit card that had been at the top of the stack.  Each time I turned a balance to zero?

Why did Angela Merkel cross the road?  Because she wanted to go that way and the pedestrian crossing sign indicated it was safe to do so.

I smiled.  I had decoupled a bit from my debt.  It took six years to get out, and four of those I was married to The Mrs.  I still recall paying a final bill on my final credit card on a crisp January morning.  I had no debt, not even car debt at that point.  Heck, I even paid the exorcist so my house wouldn’t be repossessed.

In my case, decoupling my bills from my paycheck was one of the greatest days of my life – knowing that, regardless of what happened next week was safe.  Then that savings stretched out to a month.  Then six months.  Then a year.

Decoupling gives you time and space, often those things in an emergency that you can’t buy with any amount of money.  Remember the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020?  Sure it was rough, but that’s just how Americans roll.

But one of the biggest lessons is, according to Henny Youngman:

“Why are divorces expensive?  They’re worth it.”

Money Is A Meme

“The Mandela Effect has been an Internet meme for almost a decade. It’s always been called that.” – The X-Files

Where does the Federal Reserve keep inflation?  In debasement.

What is a meme?  In general, a meme is like a bit of cultural information.  It’s an idea that spreads virally.  What are some examples?

  • “All men are created equal.” It’s an idea that no one believes in literally, because it’s not true.  But it does carry the idea that we should all have the same rights, citizen and elected official alike.  Even though we know that’s not true, either.
  • “Taco Tuesday.”
  • “One man, one vote.” Again, another idea that is so deeply bored itself into most minds that we don’t even question if there are some people that shouldn’t
  • “Never deduct a loss carryforward in a tax year when the alternative minimum tax applies.” Well, everyone knows that, right?
  • “Violence never solves anything.” Ahh, World War II was won with Nerf® rifles?

The list makes it quite clear:  memes don’t have to be true to spread and no one should ever take tax advice from me.  What memes do have to be is simple and compelling.  This is why this particular meme was so popular back in 2014:

So that’s what an elected lord and chief of state in several Italian city-states, notably Venice and Genoa looks like!

Doge was and is funny.  It’s simple.  It’s stupid.  Almost anyone gets it.  The idea stays with you, and, in 2014 Doge was the rage.  Sure, in 2020 there were plenty of memes about quarantine, but those were all inside jokes.

Back to 2014:  Bitcoin was still in the early stage, and numerous people used the same idea to come up with a huge variety of alternative crypto offerings, most of which are worth zero now.  One alternative was the Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency based on the Doge meme.  It was done as a joke.  Recently, though, Dogecoin spiked up in value.  The current market value of all existing Dogecoin?

Over $7 billion.  I’m not making that up.  Dogecoin, a crypto based on a joke, is worth more than Uzbekistan.  It had a huge jump recently.  Why?  Elon Musk made a joke about it.

Elon is like Superman® – but every Monday evening he trades Bitcoin.  That’s his crypto-night.

So, that’s one data point.  Here’s another.  This is from the Wall Street Journal®:

Michael Levy was scrolling Twitter last September when he noticed someone mention something that he wanted to know more about. What is NBA Top Shot? He wondered.

This platform to buy, sell and collect officially licensed video highlights was months from becoming a market that would captivate and mystify basketball fans, cryptocurrency enthusiasts, sneakerheads, pandemic day traders and thousands of people stuck at home. But it wasn’t long before Levy texted his friends: “This could be big.”

He [Levy] was so convinced that he decided to spend $175,000 over the next six months on digital trading cards. They are now worth $20 million.  Levy is one of the biggest winners of a manic new market that true believers say is the future of collecting and skeptics call a slightly absurd form of speculation.

That second data point was clear to me.  Unless Levy is money laundering for the mob, there is only one logical conclusion:   Money is a meme.  There is no other logical reason for a video clip to be worth $20 million unless it shows Jesus and Jimmy Hoffa riding the Ark of the Covenant.

I had been playing with the idea that money is a meme recently.  Historically gold and silver were the currencies of choice, possibly because when the Hittites traded with the Aztecs there weren’t enough computer servers to validate a blockchain, and the Hittites weren’t big fans of Michael Jordan, so they couldn’t trade NBA® clips, either.

Little known fact:  the Aztecs worshiped a salted baked bread god called Pretzalcoatl.

Nope.  They had to settle for the original meme, which is a little bit heavier than the data.

It was a lot, lot later that the Romans invented their own particular meme:  they took the silver out of their money and started making it out of Chinesium – you know, that mystery metal you get with cheap stuff from China?  To substitute for making crappy coins, they had to make a lot of coins, thus creating the meme of inflation.

Why I’m concerned about inflation is this:  collectively, we as a nation believe inflation into existence just like a cartoon version of Santa Claus.  Right now, money is sitting in huge pots everywhere.  As soon as people start believing in inflation?

They’ll buy stuff.  Any stuff.  They’ll want to turn their cheap money into something that isn’t losing value day after day and it will flow like quicksilver through the economy.  One story from Weimar Germany during their inflation mentioned a person who bought bedpans.

Why bedpans?  It was better than hanging on to the German Mark.  At least it was worth something.

Apple® is doing a great job to help the economy – they’ve already adjusted their prices for the next 15 years of inflation.

Inflation isn’t a big thing, until it is, until we collectively believe it’s a problem – as soon as the meme takes hold?

Wow.  Much moneys.  Much smalle.  Sad.

Disclaimer:  John Wilder is an Internet humorist who is much better at writing dank memes than predicting the economy and is not a registered financial advisor.  Be responsible for your choices.      

Consequences Of The Broken Balance

“Ummm, I’m gonna need you to go ahead come in tomorrow.  So if you could be here around nine that would be great, ummm kay. Ahh, I almost forgot ahh, I’m also gonna need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday too, kay. We ahh lost some people this week and ahh, we sorta need to play catch up.” – Office Space

Would John Henry have upgraded to the iPhone® 12?

There have been some pretty significant trends of dehumanization of the workforce.  It might seem like dehumanization is a story right out of 2021, but this trend isn’t new.  The legend of John Henry, that steel drivin’ man that raced a steam drill shows that the fear of machines replacing people and changing the way they work dates back at least as far as the 1800s.  At least John Henry’s performance review only ended with his heart exploding.

I blame Materialism, but more on that in a bit.

There are more and more jobs where each second of employee performance is analyzed and optimized and timed.  I’ve written (some) about this previously (How To Beat Any Computer At Chess*).

There are more people today working under deep surveillance at work than ever before:

  • Don’t perform as well as the computer metric says you should in customer satisfaction surveys?
  • Bosses that are upset that people get sick on Wednesday and never on Saturday or Sunday? And employees blame their weekend immune system.
  • Don’t move in the optimum path from one place to another to pick an item off of a shelf?
  • Bosses firing people with the worst posture? Well, we all have a hunch who that is.
  • Take too long per item to ring out a customer?
  • Not enough keystrokes per minute on the company computer?

These are jobs that are created that use humans as interchangeable parts – ones that wear out or are defective and that can be replaced.  Of course, jobs like this have existed since, well, jobs existed.  Mining comes to mind.  Building railroads probably wasn’t a ball of fun, either.  But in both of those, at least, the job had room for innovation, thought, and human ability.

These children actually worked in a coal seam.  Child labor laws back then weren’t a miner issue.

I think the biggest problem is that people have forgotten that businesses exist for the benefit of society – society doesn’t exist for the benefit of businesses.  In my younger, more libertarian days, I missed that point.  Even though I love freedom (still!) I was always skeptical of the power of big business.

Also, I was always concerned about businesses that produced nothing.  I didn’t have the framework to explain it then, but I do now.

Businesses exist for three reasons:

To benefit society by creating value.

A business can easily fall short of this if it’s an abusive monopoly or makes its profits based on political pull and persuasion – an example would be solar scams during Obama, and military scams, well, any time.  What’s an invulnerable weapon system?  One that has parts made in every Congressional district.  Even if the military doesn’t want it.

No, creating value isn’t the same thing as government forcing money at a company.  Creating value is a much deeper concept – it’s where someone makes something and society gets better.  It doesn’t even have to be a physical thing, the words written by an author aren’t physical, but they create value when enjoyed by an audience.

Of course, physical items are awesome, too.  PEZ®, anyone?

Z3d looks like “Zed.”  Thank you for attending my Zed Talk.

To benefit employees by providing meaningful, necessary work.

When mass business first started, Henry Ford did an amazing thing:  he doubled the wages he paid his employees.  Why?  First, to get a good, stable workforce.  Second, to increase the productivity of that workforce.  Assembly lines were new, and getting a good workforce was crucial.

The experiment was successful, and helped Ford increase production while lowering overall costs.

Today, when you’ve got a good job, you know it.  You’re working on tough things that are right at the limit of your capability.  You’re engaged.  You’ve got support so you don’t sink.  You know what you’re supposed to be working on.  And you’re part of a team.

That sort of work is fun.

To allocate profits to shareholders and owners.

This is also required.  Winners make profits and get more opportunity to manage bigger businesses.  Losers don’t, and their businesses fold.  In a well-functioning society, those profits accrue to those who are creating value, which in turn allows them to create even more value.  I don’t know about you, but I’ve never gotten a job (in business) from a company that had less money than I did.

The most profitable part of the lemonade stand I had when I was growing up?  Selling the antidote.

These three things are a delicate balance.  Too much emphasis on any one of the three is poison to the system:

  • Collective farms in the Soviet Union attempted to “create value” in society by creating awful jobs for people who had no real incentive to do a good job. Result?  Tens of millions dead, followed (much later) by the collapse of an entire country.  But the Soviets did develop an impressive system to stand in line all day.
  • Government, where often it’s set up for the benefit of the employees. What business would you go to where the customer (you and I) has to park farther away than the employee?  That wouldn’t happen at almost any business looking to make a profit.  But does your local police department save the best spaces for citizens?  Does your local DMV?  If so, you’re not the customer.  They are.
  • Hedge funds, high-frequency traders are an example of a business that does, in many cases, literally nothing to help the economy outside of extracting wealth. That’s it.  It’s a casino view of the world, where vampires that produce no value game the system for profit.

Why don’t hedge fund managers ever have problems with ticks or mosquitos?  Professional courtesy.

Imbalance in any of these features leads us to a dystopia.  Our current dystopia in the United States comes from the employee-centric Federal government.  Call it The Swamp or call it the Deep State, it’s all the same.

Even now, the function of some government agencies is so impaired as to be comical –  we have a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that wants to put Internet traders in jail and a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms that sells none of those things.  Also?  It’s nearly impossible to fire a Federal government employee.

Unless they’re on the Right.

Hedge funds and other Wall Street hangers-on don’t care about creating value for society.  They don’t care about employees of the firms they buy and gut.  They just want profits, and want them now, please.  Thankfully the SEC will regulate them.  What?  Oh, sorry, the SEC will protect them.  My bad.

Almost all of the horrors of the world are an imbalance between these forces, and each produces its own, unique dysfunctional society.

My friend told me that Biden was going to build a monument to George Orwell.  “Where??”  “Well, pretty much everywhere.”

The root cause for this imbalance is Materialism, the idea that only physical things matter, and a loss of the idea that there is a higher purpose.  Materialism is the very foundation of both Marxism and Libertarianism, and, when applied strictly, is the separation of morality from culture.

I can even prove that Materialism is in complete control in 2021:  Is there a higher crime in society than standing up against something that is morally wrong?  Well, in a world where the rule is “do as thou wilt” saying something is wrong is the highest crime.

I’d call that Materialist.  In fact, I’d bet $10 on it.

The Funniest Article You’ve Ever Read About Bon Jovi And The Everything Bubble

“Yeah, it was like, even though Bubbles was Bubbles, he was two people at the same time as bein’ Bubbles. He was trying to be this other person that wasn’t Bubbles, but he was still Bubbles.” – Trailer Park Boys

What was Schrödinger’s favorite Bon Jovi song? Wanted Dead or Alive.

Euphoria. The name even sounds good. It comes from the Greek “Eu” meaning “quite slippery and frictionless” and the Greek “phoros” which means “wet”. A direct translation is “Slippery When Wet,” as noted by the great Italian philosopher, Giovanni Bongiovi.

If you’ve ever been to a college party you’ve seen the application of euphoria over common sense, especially in the hours between 11 P.M. and 1 A.M. It’s at that time that the liquor has hit several partygoers like a Canadian baboon on a yak crotch. They have ambition. They have a limitless lack of common sense.

There is no tomorrow! Party on!

And euphoria has had several pleasant outcomes: more than one happy accident of a child has turned up nine months after the euphoria ended. Let’s face it – if every child was planned, there’d be six or so people living in the United States.

Justin Trudeau’s parents decided they don’t want kids anymore. Who is going to tell Justin?

Euphoria has even allowed people to exceed what they themselves ever thought possible. When throwing common sense to the wind, sometimes the outer limits of human performance are defined – we find out what it is that we can really do.

More often than not? We end up flat on our faces. That can be its own victory, but it’s often part of a longer story.

The real interesting part is when euphoria meets money. That’s when we get stupid, and we start convincing ourselves of crazy things.

The biggest crazy thing of my life was the Dotcom Bubble. That was amazing. Companies were formed in days and then ended up being “worth” ten million dollars a week later, without ever producing a product. Heck, it wasn’t just producing a product – they didn’t even know what product they were going to produce.

Spanish coders like to use Si++.

Several of my friends were caught up in the front end of one Dotcom venture. They were flown to a kickoff party. The band at the kickoff party? Hall and Oates®. Sure, Hall and Oates™ were 20 years past their prime, but, still, the kickoff was for the idea of installing some fiber optic cables.

It wasn’t even that large of a project. I’m not sure if they ever built any fiber optics. But when I asked if I could be at the party my boss said, “I can’t go for that.” (Sorry jokes aside, they really did hire Hall and Oates© for the party.)

How much oat could Hall and Oates haul if Hall and Oates hauled oats?

Another friend sold his website for a total of $50,000,000. The website was making a profit – about $1,000 a month. Of course, the kicker was that he sold his website for $50,000,000 in Alta-Vista® stock that he couldn’t sell for a year.

Oops.

Don’t cry for him – he didn’t have enough money to retire, but he had enough that he took three years off to hike and relax.

Euphoria makes people do crazy things.

The second crazy thing that happened in my life was the Housing Bubble. When I was looking for one loan, I was told that I qualified to borrow ten times my annual income.

“Why would you offer me that kind of money? I could never pay it back.”

The Loan Officer responded, “Yeah, I know, but you qualify for it. So the computer tells me I have to offer it to you.”

We all know how well that ended.

Thankfully they allowed me to finish the “Alan Parsons Project” I was working on.

Through this, Citigroup® has maintained a panic/euphoria model. The idea is that there is a way to measure what investors think about the market. Are they panicked? Or are they as giddy as drunken freshmen at their first college kegger.

If investors are skittish, the idea is that stocks are a bargain. People are afraid of stocks and would be happy to sell them to you. It’s the idea of buying when blood is in the street.

But if investors are euphoric, then the prices for things are too high. How high? Double-digit high.

Looks like party central!

Right now, Citigroup’s® panic/euphoria model is flashing “Slippery When Wet and Three Tequila Shooters.” It’s higher than the Dotcom® Bubble. It’s much higher than the excesses of the Housing Bubble.

It’s the Everything Bubble. And investors are still three sheets to the wind, knee-walking, too-loud singing, drunk.

This makes sense, too. Presidents love to pop the bubble in the first year of their first term. It’s not like people will remember the pain three years from now, if they’re able to manage growth and restart the economy. Besides, you can blame the pain on the last guy.

I guess he swallowed a few on that “steel horse” he rides.

There is ample incentive for Biden to crater the market. There is ample incentive for him to crater employment, too. In both of those things, he can restart the clock and claim growth from worst that 2021 or 2022 brings to us.

If we’re lucky, all we get is a hangover. I don’t think anyone wants this baby.

GameStop: The Tip Of The Corruption Iceberg

“And pruned the hedges of many small villages.” – Three Amigos

Amazing what happens when you find the world is corrupt . . . .

GameStop®.

In a world filled with COVID-19 shutdowns and Internet sites where you can download nearly any game ever made for low prices, it seemed like a sure thing that GameStop™ would fail. Except . . . people liked going. The profits weren’t through the roof, and the business model was older. Heck, the last time I was in a GameStop™ was over eight years ago, and about half the shelf space was pop-culture memorabilia and nerd toys, not games.

Never mess with weaponized autism.

Seeing this, the Wizards of Wall Street® decided to “short” GameStop™. I’ll explain what that is, and I promise you my analogy will be far funnier than what CNN© does unintentionally – and that’s a high bar.

Let’s pretend that you and I are friends. You brought the latest Pac-Man© cartridge game. Since you trust me, you lend it to me.

Addled on Monster™ Energy Drink© and chicken tendies, I waddle down to the local GameStop©. Since there is a relative shortage of Pac-Man™, GameStop™ offers me $50 for the cartridge. I pocket it and go home.

Two months later, you sober up and remember I borrowed your vidya game, and ask for it back. I waddle my greasy fingers down to GameStop© and buy a used cartridge. It’s not the original one that you lent me, sure, but you’ll never know the difference, not with your hygiene.

Since Atari© has made a metric buttload of additional Pac-Man© cartridges, the price to buy a used version is now $30. I buy it. I give it back to you. I pocket the $20, and no one is the wiser.

Last week was like no other . . .

That’s a short sale. I borrowed a commodity – one Pac-Man© video game cartridge (minor wear and tear excluded) is functionally exactly the same as any other Pac-Man™ cartridge.

That’s (sort of) what the hedge funds were trying to do with the shares of GameStop©, but with one crucial difference: the price went up. And they sold more shares of GameStop™ than exist.

That can happen in two ways. The first is legal. If I owned 100 shares of GameStop©, my broker could loan them to someone going short. They’re selling legal, actual shares. I might really, really, like GameStop™, so maybe I buy 100 more.

My account says that I have 200 shares of GameStop© now. I think I have 200 shares of GameStop™, but in reality, my broker only has 100. The same thing happens in a fractional reserve bank (like your bank) in that if you put $100 in, the bank might loan it all out. You think you have $100, but that $100 was loaned to someone. Just like shorting a stock, it sounds illegal, but it’s not.

So how does that work with my previous analogy?

Ahh, in a perfect world.

It’s exactly the same. If the price of Pac-Man© goes from $50 to $30, then I make $20. But if there’s a fire at the Pac-Man© cartridge plant in Roswell, New Mexico (because they use alien slave-labor from Arcturus to make them), and the price goes up to $100?

I’m out $50. But how often do the Arcturans revolt? Not often.

So, we’ve seen how my little deal could go wrong. But how wrong could it get? Infinitely wrong. Let’s say that I do this with 1000 Pac-Man© games, since it’s a sure thing. So, GameStop© gives me $50,000. Now I just sit and wait.

Yup, the hedgies lost billions.

But the fire thing happens. And since everyone else sold all of their friend’s Pac-Man© games before the factory caught fire, the price goes up. Way up. Like up twenty times in price. Let’s see, 20 times $50 is . . . $1,000 a copy. So now, since I borrowed that $50,000 in hopes of making $20,000 when the price went down, I’m actually in really bad shape.

I owe 1000 games times $1,000 dollars. I owe my friends, collectively, $1,000,000.

Ooops.

Musk is no fan of short sellers since they tried to destroy Tesla® a few years ago.

This is what the hedge funds did. And since (I believe) some of them are what is known as a “market-maker” they have 21 days to come up with those games (shares). 21 days is forever, so don’t worry about those billionaires – most of them are still billionaires – they just will have to wait until next month to buy that second volcano island death lair.

This is the situation that the Reddit© group r/wallstreetbets found – GameStop© was horribly oversold by hedge funds, and just a few people buying could start pushing the price up.

At one point, one of the r/wallstreetbets early investors in the short squeeze was up $48,000,000. That’s not a typo.

With a short, there’s a lot of power as the price goes up. The Hedge Fund Leech that runs the hedge fund starts to get nervous, and adds to the buying pressure as he tries to buy stocks to “cover his short.” This actually increases the price, sometimes causing it to go upward. A lot upward.

If that was all that happened, it would have been an amusing story. Wall Street Leeches get one-upped by message-board posters. Ha ha!

Something wonderful about that, right?

But that’s not all that happened. Immediately, the news media, (some) trading houses (most notably Robinhood©) and the talking heads began talking about how this was bad. The people who normally distort the economy and screw over the middle class don’t really like it when the weapons that they use are used against them.

Google®? Not on your side.

Well, actually none of them are on your side.

Huh. And they invest big dollars for that privilege. How much money have they given Janet Yellen, Secretary of the Treasury? A lot.

Whose side is Joltin’ Janet on? Not yours.

Last week on Thursday and Friday the powers that be told the markets to “shut down” the Internet Freedom Party raid on the financial leaches. In fact, several articles extolled how the Hedge Fund Leeches were the real heroes.

I’m feeling so sorry for him!

It’s a big game, but you and I are not supposed to play. You’re supposed to buy shares in your 401K so the Hedge Fund Leeches can take your money and collude with each other to own the economy. The free market is, in principle, a great thing. People buy and sell. The market allows the prices to be shared by all.

Well, I used to be the guy in front.

But Monday? Someone spent a quarter billion dollars to depress GameStop©. It’s analyzed here (thanks to r/wallstreetbets):

Also, people forget this: there were Hedge Funds on the other side of the deal. Vampires don’t need prices to go down, they can also make money when prices are going up.

Who knew that Karen ran the SEC?

No. Big players distort prices, they sell and buy options to make money on stocks that they intend to dump for short term profits after manipulating the markets. That this financial vampirism actually destroys companies, jobs, and communities?

And they will call you anything to make a buck.

Who cares? Not the Wall Street Hedge Leeches. Here’s Tucker Carlson with a discussion about one Wall Street Hedge Leach destroying an entire town in Nebraska. For a few million bucks. They would do that to you, your family, and everyone you know for a 2% return.

If you’re not mad, you’re not paying attention.

None of this is financial advice, you hosers. So, take off, eh. All of the memes are “as found” on the Internet.

Pyramids, Captain Kirk, And Skills

“Seven days ago one of my satellites over Antarctica discovered a pyramid.” – Alien vs. Predator

A friend tried to rope me into a pyramid scam.  “Don’t you want to be your own boss,” he asked me.  “No, I hate working for jerks.”

When I graduated from college, I graduated at the same time as one of my close friends.  The employment market was only so-so, but we both managed to grab jobs in a town near the college.  Whereas my job was, um, more rough and tumble (I was a rodeo clown at for chubby people at the Golden Corral® – my worst day was when Megan McCain and Oprah showed up together), my friend’s job ended up being at a suit and tie kind of place.  Thankfully, we still were working in the same city, and we got together frequently.

One night he asked a question over Buffalo wings and too many beers:  “Where did they go?”

“What?  Where did who go?”

“All the old guys.  I mean, I go to work, and I see that there are dozens of people less than thirty.  Then, maybe twenty percent are between thirty and forty.  After forty?  It’s a wasteland.  Hardly anyone but upper management is over forty.”

I thought about his question.  Where did they go?  The company I was working at (and most of the companies I’ve worked at since then) had a similar pyramid shape.  Some have been steeper, and some shallower, but all have had that shape.

I have a good construction joke, but I’m still working on it.

So, where did they go?

Well, they didn’t retire – not from the company they were at – they didn’t make nearly enough to retire at 27 and live on the island with Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain and Robert Johnson.

Nope.  The vanished people were gone.  Where?  Somewhere else.  Some other industry, some other career.  It was uno, dos, and then they vanished without a tres.

Probably the biggest reason for that pyramid shape is that younger people cost less.  Do they know less?  Sure, but inexpensive is an attribute all of its own.

But any hierarchical organization has fewer slots for leaders than for followers.  The armed forces are a similar example.  I once made the acquaintance of a (no kidding) Captain Kirk.  Now, this Captain Kirk wasn’t in Starfleet®, he was in the United States Army.  And he was sweating for promotion.

Captain Kirk was denied promotion.  I’m thinking that someone the Pentagon saw that Captain Kirk was trying to be promoted to Major Kirk, and that there was no way that the Army would ever give up the numerical superiority they had over the Navy in their number of Captain Kirks.

No, not this Kirk.

The armed forces are a classic example of that pyramid structure:  there are fewer generals than colonels, and fewer colonels than majors.  And, if officers (in a certain range) fail to be promoted a certain number of times?

Well, there’s the door.  So, Captain Kirk soon enough was in the private sector, and I lost track of him from there.  I think he got lost somewhere in the Veridian System.

Most (but not all) companies are built upon this pyramid model.  I’ve seen high-end consulting firms where it’s a paradise for everyone born in the Eisenhower era, but those are the exception, not the rule.  Plus, they charge enough to pay for the most expensive video-streaming service ever:  college during Corona.

So, the rub is that for many, the rule is up or out.

What to do?

Invest in the one thing that can never be taken away from you:  your skills.

My poor reading skills cost me a career in sex-worker management.  On the bright side, now I own a warehouse.

In 2017 I would have given a completely different list of skills than 2021.  It would have been far more dull and predictable.  But 2021?  2021 is like a tarot card reader’s business:  unpredictable.  Part of it will come down to plain dumb luck and good timing.

I’d suggest:

  • Have general skills. General skills are widely applicable and get a job quickly in lots of different locations.    Teacher.  Tom Brady’s tooth polisher.
  • Or, have skills that are so specific that they are nearly impossible to replicate. (Specific skills require a time and a place.  I’m sure that all of the folks working on the Keystone XL pipeline had great skills.  Until those skills aren’t needed.)  If you want a great choice for the Biden year, I’d suggest a carbon-neutral way to turn cash into Democratic votes.  Oh, wait, they’ve got that figured out.
  • Protip: growth industries will be the ones that the Left loves for the next two years, at least.  If it’s green and fuzzy, the Left will fill it full of money.  I’m thinking of investing in pool tables.
  • Have skills that can’t be done remotely from a foreign country. Right now, that includes teaching.  I’m sure there are more, but I’ve been at a loss since Biden figured out how to be the president from China.
  • Have skills where a certification that a foreigner can’t get are required. Top secret clearances are nice.  I’m working on a top-secret project to ferment honey to make ethanol for cars.  The project is all on a mead-to-know basis.

To be fair, I had an addiction to stealing traffic lights.  But I could stop whenever I wanted to.

A lot of the suggestions above would have made the 2017 list.

In 2021, however, I must stress that the world might get a lot more, um, basic than we’re used to.  The reason that my Great-Great-Grandma McWilder (GGGMcW) did fine during the Great Depression was she knew how to make clothes from cloth, a needle, and thread.  And if the cloth wasn’t big enough for a dress?  It was big enough to be made into part of a hand-made quilt.  Like Jean-Luc Picard, she could make it sew.

GGGMcW also knew how to raise chickens.  And raise a garden.  Probably 30% or more of the calories they ate came from the backyard – as he added soil to the garden, I’m sure he said, “so, the plot thickens.”  But Great-Great-Grandpa McWilder was no slouch, either.  He didn’t have a great repair shop, but the man fixed every aspect of his house, by himself.  Roof leaked?

It was his job to fix.  Ants?  His to kill.  Broken suitcase handle?  His to fix.

Honestly, I don’t recall them buying anything much more than flour, sugar, bread, chicken, and hamburger and the occasional vegetable.  I don’t think the area was friendly to corn so I think they got that in cans.  They would have grown more vegetables, but they weren’t from Okra-homa.

I installed a beer tap in my house – now The Mrs. complains that she can’t take a shower.

But there was more.  The Great-Greats were also tied into their community, and had been there a decade.  The connections they had bonded them to the community.  How so?  During the Depression they raised another child from a family that couldn’t afford to feed the kid.

The pyramid is real.  In many ways opportunities may diminish over time.  But life goes on, so keep investing in the skills that you might need.

All of them.  Because you have no idea what the future might bring.