Wealth – Page 3 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Bad Economics Destroys Wealth

“Hey, there’s no airbag. I can fly out through the windshield?” – Rocketman

Toyota® introduced their new Nagasaki airbag – they say “you won’t feel the impact”.

Annually, about 2800 lives are saved by airbags. Hurray!

Annually, 13.6 million new cars are sold. That probably doesn’t rate a hurray, I mean, not ever fact is exciting.

I’m guessing (numbers are sketchy) that it costs approximately $2000 per car to add airbags. This number may be a bit high, but replacing a single airbag can cost $2000, and many new cars have so many airbags that some cars can legally be sold as bubble wrap.

By federal law, all passenger autos sold must include airbags.

That pencils out to an annual cost of $27.2 billion dollars in additional consumer spending.

For airbags.

So, we have all of the math ready for us: how much does it cost to save a human life.

(drumroll)

About $10 million dollars per life saved.

Every Monday evening, Superman® researches bitcoin. That’s his crypto-night.

That’s insane. I mean, I know the goal is a good one, but why is the federal government mandating that Americans spend an average of $10 million dollars per person to save them? Heck, I don’t like most people even $50,000 worth. But $10 million?

This number, and, indeed the federal mandate that airbags be installed on everything on the highway is a product of the “safety at all costs” culture. Their motto is, “If only one human life is saved . . .” which is meant as a rallying cry for whatever uneconomic idea that they want to put forward. An actual economist, Thomas Sowell, made the argument that if you wanted people to drive safely you’d replace the airbag with a big Bowie knife. I tried to verify that quote, but the link that I came up with was . . . my site.

So, I couldn’t verify it, except by myself. I’m not sure I’m a reliable source, but, hey.

It would also decrease emergency room visits. Save him? No, then how would he learn anything?

Hit the brakes too hard?

Sorry about that – there are consequences to the driver.

Imagine how polite drivers would be then? If not, think of the lowered hospital visits!

The news is simple: no one makes it out of here alive. No one. We cannot escape the one inevitable consequence of living, which is death. The GloboLeftSafetyPatrol thinks that if we spend billions of dollars, we can make Death go away. No, at least in 2024, the only thing that we can do is shoo Death away from our doorstep for a little while by using better diet and exercise and maybe renting an 18-year-old to use as a blood donor to live off of them like a vampire. I heard them called “blood boys” once.

If I brought the concept that actions have consequences up with a GloboLeftist, it would break their mind. They live in a world where money is what other people provide to satisfy all the wants of the world. In my experience, most people want a lot more than the world can afford, so we have to make choices. Not everyone can afford a blood boy.

Asian fathers are disappointed if their son has a B+ blood type.

That’s the basis of economics, making the least-bad choice given the information you know at the time.

The second thing that drives the GloboLeftistSafetyPatrol nuts is the idea that people might have a choice. It drives them nuts. What if I wanted to buy a car that didn’t have airbags?

I’m the bad guy.

Why? Well, for that to be the case, the GloboLeftSafetyPatrol has decided that they own me.

To be clear, I do believe that there are obligations that an individual has with society, and that a society has for an individual. Pure libertarianism in the absence of an infinite expanding frontier is simply not workable, though it has been tried and certainly worked better than communism and with a much smaller body count.

A similar bad choice is involved with the decision to import the swarming masses of parasite carrying (link below) illegals to replace actual citizens. All of the job growth post-COVID has been by immigrants, either of the legal (or, since there are millions and millions of them) more likely illegal aliens.

Could It All Be Worms Making The Decisions For The Left?

When illegals do a home invasion is it a house swarming party?

In one way this is a multiple hit to the economy. First, these aliens, on average consume a lot more resources than are offset by the tax revenue they produce and work that they do.

For every illegal crossing the border, the economy has that much more sand poured in the gears in terms of unpaid for medical cost, schooling costs, infrastructure costs, and benefits cost. The average illegal costs far more than the average veteran, and much more than the average veterinarian. Heck, they even cost more than the average vegan, though they’re not so smug.

Second, for every illegal that consumes additional housing, often in conditions of squalor with much higher occupancy than an American family, the housing stock is consumed, raising prices. I read one story about a Canadian apartment where the inhabitants were living in every room in the house, including having a bed in the kitchen where two people lived.

Lastly, the illegals keep wages low. Literally if we import the third world, we become the third world because our wages will eventually drop to third world levels – the same goes for free trade.

Importing illegals (and, let’s face it, many legal) aliens actually makes the economy get worse, and it’s faster the more we import. With lowered demand for housing, prices would go down. With lowered amounts of workers, wages would tend to go up. Take these to the extreme, and California becomes Mumbai, but with fewer cobras.

If Chuck Norris didn’t have arms, what would his catchphrase be? “You’re about to meet de feet!”

The GloboLeft loves illegals, because of their compassion – but studies have consistently shown that their compassion is just that, a feeling, and that people on the TradRight are generally those that actually fund and charities that help people. To the GloboLeftists, that’s simply not their problem – government (meaning you and I) should take care of it.

We can’t afford airbags anymore because we’ve used that wealth on . . . airbags. And illegals. And any one of a thousand things that you or I could think of where the government either mandates waste or pursues policies that are directly detrimental to the voters. I mean, even Sweden is waking up to the concept that importing rapefugees might not be the best policy since there are no-go zones (Malmo) where actual Swedish people aren’t allowed.

But what bothers me the most is, if the government keeps wasting the wealth of the country in this fashion and at this rate, I’ll never be able to afford a blood boy.

The Latest Attack: White Fortressing

“Lord Vader will provide us with the location of the rebel fortress.” – Star Wars, A New Hope

I lost a castle in chess once. It was a rook-y mistake.

One of the unintended consequences of a multicultural society is the way that identity fuels animosity and envy. In the latest story from this dispatch comes the concept of “White Fortressing”.

What on Earth is White Fortressing? Does it involve a series of blankets covering the dining room table and various chairs to create a blanket fort, but this time using only white blankets?

No. In Louisiana, besides the Gumbo Landslides and the Alligator Squadron attacks, one of the things that people wrestle with is government. In Baton Rouge (French for “smells like mold”), Louisiana, there the people in one area have been trying to split off from the local parish. If you’re from Louisiana, no one calls those subdivisions “a parish” except you. I blame the Louisiana Purchase.

Why? People in Louisiana do things, um, differently. Heck, if Adam and Eve had been from Louisiana, they’d have eaten the snake, too.

Pictured: Louisiana after half an inch of rain.

This group of about 100,000 folks wanted to form their own city, which they have called St. George. Because this new city would be only 12% black instead of 50% black like the rest of East Baton Rouge Parish, Dr. Luisa Godinez-Puig of the Urban Institute™ coined the phrase “White Fortressing”.

What’s Dr. Luisa Godinez-Puig’s job title? “Equity Scholar.” And given that job title, it’s no wonder that, wherever she looks with her beady little eyes she sees inequity. To be fair, I can’t really tell if they’re beady, but the low-resolution picture that she uploaded makes me think that when her friends tried to set her up on blind dates they described her as having “a great personality except for the everything is racist bit”.

According to the article written by Dr. Luisa Godinez-Puig and someone named Muttley, er “Smedley” who I am sure is completely not a dog that communicates only by snickering, White Fortressing is “opportunity hoarding”. What’s that? You mean, gasp, a community would want to spend money on itself rather than ship it to other people?

I wonder if Dr. Luisa Godinez-Puig and Smedley had a cartoon, would it be called “Wacky Racists”?

To quote myself in a discussion with a friend, “Why should I want to ship money overseas? I don’t want to ship it to the next county.”

It appears that the big reason that St. George wanted to make itself a city wasn’t because Louisiana was in desperate need of a new mayor, nope, the East Baton Rouge School System appears to be crap. How crap? WAFB™, which I assume stands for War Air Force Base, reported that there were 6,587 fights that were reported in the school district over the past two years. Given that there were 40,000 students in the System, it’s likely that just under 27,000 students weren’t pulling their fair share and starting fights.

Let’s be real: most fights aren’t reported. So, this would indicate to me that the schools are likely much more violent than would be indicated by the raw numbers above. So, in 2013, a group of parents decided that enough was enough. In the St. George area, there were 16,300 or so kids going to school. Of that number, some 7,700 went to private school. I think it’s obvious why: It’s to protect the poor kids, since the rich kids can hire hitmen to take care of business.

To quote Dr. Luisa Godinez-Puig and her sidekick Smedley: “When white communities fortress themselves, they siphon away resources from the larger region, including communities of color.”

Important note: before providing Human Resources with a urine sample, make sure they requested one first.

That’s what the people of St. George are to Dr. Luisa Godinez-Puig and her sidekick Smedley: “resources”. I suppose that a charitable way to put this is that these people are really just tax slaves. The “Opportunity Hoarding” that Dr. Luisa Godinez-Puig and her sidekick Smedley describe is really just Dr. Luisa Godinez-Puig and her sidekick Smedley’s Opportunity to Hoard the tax dollars coming from people who just want out of a failing, violent system.

Those ingrates! They and their children should just stay and take the beatings and worse that they so obviously deserve!

This is the mind of the GloboLeft: their job isn’t to provide a shared initiative to block those who would try to invade or enslave us. Nope. They view their job is to mine us for resources so we don’t “Hoard” our productivity and thus deprive them of their “Opportunity” to extract their pound of flesh.

The hypocrisy of the GloboLeft is laid bare by this:

Their god is democracy, except when people vote against them. This is why they always use the term “Our Democracy”. You and I simply do not need to apply.
If white people leave an area due to violence or high tax rates due to transfer payments, it’s called “White Flight” and it’s bad. So bad, because (apparently) the GloboLeft really wants people around?
No, they don’t. When white people move back into an urban hellscape and begin to economically transform it for the better, that’s “Gentrification” and it’s also bad because it raises the taxes from their previous “urban war zone” level.
Finally, if people just want to stay in the same place, and govern themselves, their horribly shellfish because they don’t want to share their taxes with the greater region. Heck, those ingrates probably don’t want to ship their tax dollars to Raytheon™ so they can build bombs to give to foreign countries or Boeing® so that Boeing© software programmers can continue trying to solve the deep mystery of the coloring book in the break room.
Who self-segregates more than anyone? The GloboLeftElite.

Hey, don’t laugh, battering rams were a real breakthrough.

The GloboLeftElite always, always, has the same idea – the things that are produced by individuals belong solely to them – there was a reason the Iron Curtain existed – and it wasn’t to keep people out. Whereas I really do believe that certain services and regulations are required, my view of the world is “anything not illegal is allowed.” Their view? “Anything not mandatory is prohibited.” I wish that last phrase was something that I made up, but it’s not, but I wish even more that the GloboLeftElite hadn’t heard it, since it appears to be their game plan.

The aptly named Larry Fink.

An irony of this is that the school district proposed by the folks who put together the city of St. George isn’t even particularly white: only 35% of the public school students would be white.

I guess, in the end, White Fortressing simply means, “Not spending your tax dollars the way our GloboLeftElite overlords wanted”. Maybe they could shut themselves up in their own safe space.

What color blankets do you think Doctor Luisa Godinez-Puig and her sidekick Smedley would want?

Catabolic Collapse – Coming Soon To A Place Near You

“Out these windows, we will view the collapse of financial history.” – Fight Club

My friend struggled with steroid addiction, but it only made him stronger.

If you’re a bodybuilder, the word “anabolic” is your friend. While often used in conjunction with the word steroids, anabolic really means “taking the proteins and stuff you eat and turning it into more complex stuff for your body”. Like I said, that’s a good thing if you’re in shape as a body builder. The Mrs. says that that spherical is technically a shape, so I guess I’m technically in shape. At least in “a” shape.

But just like there is day balanced by night (see, I can be poetic!) anabolic is balanced by the less commonly used word “catabolic”. And, just like an anode has a cathode, catabolic means the opposite. If I’m dieting, the word catabolic is my friend – it rips apart complex molecules like fat that represent stored energy, releasing the energy, and making my shape appear less spherical as the fat is turned into energy releasing sweet, sweet CO₂.and plutonium.

Ahh, back when a screwdriver was the height of nuclear safety protocol. (meme as found, if obscure, look up “demon core”).

Economic growth is anabolic. Building a house takes a complex logistics chain of materials and manpower and creates a yet more complex outcome, assembled only with effort and time. A house fire is therefore catabolic – it torches and burns the whole thing down, much faster than it took to build. But allowing a house’s roof to fail and the house to rot is also catabolic – it just takes a lot longer.

Just as it applies to houses and body shape, catabolic can also apply to economies. Essentially every day after the paving of a road is complete, the road is rotting. At first this happens slowly. However, then, as water gets a chance to penetrate it and freeze and thaw, the decay happens much more quickly.

What happens when we can’t afford to fix stuff? It slowly rots. Buildings slowly decay. Street signs fade. Water pipes burst. Kardashians move in.

How are Kardashians like deer? They get new racks every year.

Just like keeping a body from starving requires continual food, keeping a complex system operating and running requires continual wealth and effort. Every bridge, unless maintained, will collapse. A comment last week talked about a pullback of restaurants in their area, more in keeping with what was in place decades ago.

Decades ago, even in Modern Mayberry, there weren’t a lot of external chain restaurants, not even a McDonald’s™. McDonald’s© business model requires a Regional owner who owns multiple McDonald’s™ to build a restaurant on land the McDonald’s Corporation© owns and lease the restaurant from the Corporation®. It also requires that the restaurant go through suppliers that the Corporation® selects to purchase stuff like food and cups and napkins. On top of that, the Corporation™ takes a percent off the top for profit.

The Regional owner pays the Corporation©, but also takes the profits. The remainder goes to costs, including labor.

I once had a sirloin sandwich at McDonald’s®. I’ll never do it again, that was a Big McSteak™.

Back in, say, 1960, all the profits, including the money the local bank lent for the mortgage on Ma and Pa’s Diner, stayed in the community. Many of the costs would as well, especially if the beef and vegetables were locally sourced through the butcher. While the City wasn’t a closed economy, it still retained a lot of the money currently being extracted and kept it local. But when the economy is prosperous, there’s enough wealth being generated, and the extraction of a bit of it doesn’t matter all that much.

Now? The excess cash is hoovered out of the local economy with maximum velocity. That turns the people that would have run Ma and Pa’s Diner or the butcher shop or the local grocery store into wage employees rather than entrepreneurs. Amazon© and eBay™ have removed the reason for small shops selling specific items like games or cooking utensils, and that leaves room for Walmart™ to sell bulk commodities. At least our local Walmart® isn’t like a Target® store in the big cities, which I hear now come complete with their own police precincts.

In a small town like Modern Mayberry, that’s one thing, but last week I wrote about the beginning of the collapse of the casual dining (as opposed to the philosophic problem created by causal dining) restaurant chains. There are none of these in Modern Mayberry, because we’re far too small for an RedAppleChiliLobsterBees™. No, the extraction is starting to fail in the suburbs as well.

I always stop my microwave when the clock hits 0:01, which makes me feel like a bomb disposal expert.

It was mentioned that area was going back the earlier “norm” of restaurants, but the reason is because the middle class has been squeezed. This squeezing of the middle class is catabolic and will destroy demand. This is why, right now, the economy shrinking while stocks continue upwards. A recession is occurring in the middle class even as profits are up. This is the collapse, but as discussed last week, it’s not sudden, until it is.

I’ve described Modern Mayberry, but I’ve also described the core areas of many larger cities, where as our economy moved from making things into reality to making profits on paper, the core died. I’ve walked through the bones of industries long sent overseas and seen the majestic steel columns holding up the roof over an empty space, long since dead and forgotten. That’s also catabolic.

The good news is that it starts slow, but picks up speed. As I’ve said before, we’re standing on the edge of a new land ready to be born, that will be far different from what we’ve seen in the past. The things we’ve taken for granted will no longer be there in many cases. I’m looking at you, Social Security.

When The Mrs. was giving birth she seemed in discomfort, so I asked, “What’s wrong, honey?” She responded, “These contractions are killing me!” So, I asked, “What is wrong, honey?”

What matters is the rebuilding. There will be choices to be made – some that will lead to freedom, some to serfdom. As we’ve seen that paths leading away from the True, Beautiful, and Good always end in failure, most often spectacular failure, I’m optimistic.

I must be. That’s why I keep dieting.

France, Spain, And The Fate Of The United States

“If we bail out we can hide out in a French girl’s hayloft.” – Memphis Belle

My cat’s a commie. Keeps wanting free food and only talks about Mao.

Over a decade ago, I was reading a post by John Michael Greer (here’s a (LINK) to his current blog). In that post, he talked about time compression and our tendency to not think about historical events in the timeframe that people actually lived them. His example was that of a young girl, born at the time of the French Revolution.

In my mind, the French Revolution turned to the Napoleonic era and the defeat at Waterloo in a fairly short time. I mean, I knew it took longer than the two days we spent on it in World History in high school, but that young girl, born when heads were rolling on the guillotine, would have been 25 or 26 and likely had her own children when Napoleon got waffled in Belgium.

And that poor French girl couldn’t even post about how tough her life was on TikTok®!

26 years. That’s a number that, back when I read Greer’s post, surprised me. From a distance of 230 some years, four years of Biden is an eyeblink.

Chuck Norris once stared into the abyss, and the abyss looked away.

The amazing amount of debt that’s been printed in the last four years along with the rampant inflation made me think back to that young French girl. I think that in 100 years, people will look back on our time and compress it, and I think that they’ll talk about it as the time when the United States sank to third world standards in what, to them, will be just a paragraph in a history book.

There’s plenty of precedent for it. Spain, after the colonization of the New World, brought back ship after ship filled with massive amounts of gold and silver for a period of about 100 years. This caused several related things to happen:

The inflation from the huge supply of gold and silver distorted the entire economy of Europe, causing an inflation that lasted at least 100 years.
The huge amount of wealth caused the Spanish to import labor (a lot of to do the work that Spaniards refused to do, you know, like sweeping or making the bed). The Spanish aristocracy also was allergic to work, since they considered it low class. Apparently, the exceptions were being a professor or a priest, but mainly they just sat around in fancy clothes sweating.
Spain then got caught in an endless web of pointless wars, probably because they were bored.
Oh, and when the gold and silver stopped flowing from the New World? Yeah, they didn’t stop spending, they just went bankrupt again and again.

This is not a good combination. In less than 100 years, Spain went from being THE world power and the largest economy in the world, by far, to being poor and irrelevant.

In California you can’t get a tattoo of flames on your biceps, unless you have a fire arms permit.

I imagine the world in Spain as it declined in decadence just slowly got crappier and more expensive every day, just like we’re seeing today, as we see a long, slow slide to becoming the third world. I wrote last week about the encrapification of the Internet, but other businesses are doing it, too. McDonald’s® has record profits, but I’ve seen Big Mac® meals advertised for $15 or so.

The Mrs. bought a McFish© sandwich the other day and put it in the fridge, perhaps as some sort of religious ritual since I have no evidence that humans actually eat them. I opened it up to give it a look, and was surprised to see a biscuit-sized sandwich.

I made some fish tacos the other night, but the ungrateful fish just swam away.

It’s been a while since I’ve even seen a Filet-O-Fish©, but the last time I ate one it wasn’t made out of a single goldfish. Heck, I think the last time I ordered one was sometime during the Bush Administration. Which one? Much like Bill Clinton, I can’t remember which Bush because there were too many. Back then it was a full-sized sandwich, but at some point, it became bite-sized.

I could come up with more examples from other companies, but that one will do. Keep this in mind: McDonald’s is now a luxury food. Are McDonald’s™ sales number up? Sure! Prices have doubled. But I haven’t been there in months (which is probably good for me) due to my inability to rationalize the idea that a Big Mac™ meal costs more than a pound of ribeye steak.

I can spell panda with just two letters: P and A.

What’s the outcome? Middle class people aren’t going to restaurants nearly as much, which is causing them to fail. Examples abound:

Red Lobster© closed 87 locations
TGI Fridays® is closing 36 locations
Applebee’s™ closed up to 35 locations last year
Denny’s© closed 57 locations last year
Outback® has closed down 41 locations

Middle class people are now too poor to go to these restaurant chains. Period. Inflation has priced them out and wages, held down by continual streams of illegal aliens have not kept up.

This is part of the slow, creeping third worldism showing up in the United States.

Over the span of 26 years, where does this take us?

Why did Napoleon escape exile? He didn’t have enough Elba room.

My answer is that, just like France before the Revolution couldn’t imagine what the world would be like after Napoleon, and just like the Spanish who brought the great heaps of gold and silver back to Spain thought it was going to be totally awesome (el awesomo, I think is the Spanish translation), our first world wealth is rapidly slipping away.

The next twenty years will be, generally, poorer in the United States and in the West. The good news, however, is poorer equals poorer, not necessarily unhappier. Who knows, we might even be happier if we lose the Internet and can’t access TikTok© anymore.

The Internet Is Crappier. On Purpose.

“It’s Dr. Seuss’s birthday. Google™, even though you’ve enslaved half the world, you’re still a damn fine search engine.” – The Simpsons

I’ve had millions of hits, but none of them from Best Korea.

Today I had to spend an hour searching for PEZ® dispensers honoring the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial. Amazingly, despite the time I spent looking, no one that I could find has made a PEZ™ dispenser to honor this historic moment. To me, it was amazing that Amber’s lawyers worked so long and hard to prove that Depp was utterly innocent.

Google™ used to be better. I remember it wasn’t a little better, it was a lot better than it is today.

To be fair, I’ve mainly stopped using Google© as my search engine of choice. Besides being horrible, unethical, demonic, GloboLeftistElite shills, they also have futzed with their algorithm so much that when I do a search for common phrases that are pretty unique to my site, I don’t show up on the first two pages.

Go figure. I mean, horrible, unethical, demonic, GloboLeftistElite? I might be able to deal with that. But kill my search results?

They’re dead to me.

The FBI recently announced that Hillary Clinton’s laundry did itself.

Search had long been skewed by Google®, but the autistic programmers that originally put it all together really took that “Don’t Be Evil©” original mission statement to heart. They wanted to create great search results. They even went as far as to make sure there was a firewall between their search people and their ad people so that search was preserved.

Oh, sure, they put their thumb down as hard as they could to get Hillary selected in 2016. Heck, one researcher thought that over 3,000,000 votes were impacted by their search results, alone. Hmmm, Donald Trump is put on trial for forking over $130,000 to a tramp via a shady lawyer (yeah, he has horrible taste in people) but Google™ subverts their entire search platform in favor of a candidate?

No crime here. Move along, citizen.

Regardless, the search engine was still pretty good. As the newfound desire of the GloboLeftElite to clamp down on speech, starting about 2017, Google™ seemed to shy away from that. Again, the search results in 2017 were pretty good.

If Elon Musk really does send thousands of people to Mars, he’s either a genius or the most creative serial killer of all time.

But around 2019, the ad executives at Google™ decided that, perhaps, the search results were too good. You can read an article about that here (LINK).

The problem was that if the search engine were too good, that meant fewer searches. Fewer searches meant fewer ads. Fewer ads meant less money. The paradox was, the better Google™ got at search, the less money they made from ads.

The result was the same as at most businesses when money meets principles: money wins. Google™ searches were “encrapulated” so that they were crappier. More irrelevant sites should show up in a search. Oh, and the ads? They weren’t getting enough clicks. Solution? Make it less visible that they’re ads – make them look like legitimate search results.

But I did not know that the IRS now accepts Apple® gift cards!

Indian scammers *love* this, since now they can buy an ad, redirect people to their scam website, and get the scam going.

In a recent example, I did a search for a fairly unusual phrase, put quotes around it, and hit “go”. My quotation marks around the exact phrase I was looking for were utterly ignored. The results were . . . entirely encrapulated.

I finally remembered where the quote came from, a website that was now dark, but that someone had resurrected it elsewhere. Boom, there it was, the exact phrase (it was an article title) and I was in business. Google™, however, had ignored my “quotation marks” and my

-ignore

-results

-with

-these

-words and instead gave me a mishmash of crap that still included the trash I tried to weed out.

Now major search engines (Google©, Bing®, DuckDuckGo™) are giving only answers from the mainstream media, especially with certain topics – politics being one of them. The beauty of the Internet, circa 2005, is that the mainstream media hadn’t figured it out, so great content with dissenting voices was given a huge platform.

If NPR™ started a metal band, would it be called, “All Things Dismembered”?

Remember when Google™ used to say, “About 1,242,400 matches”? That’s gone. Google™ has stopped showing the number of pages, no doubt after people figured out that only about 225 results are ever shown.

Of course, NBCNESPNPR© has a lot of money riding on being able to provide curated news to you for fun, profit, and control – so search engines censoring any idea that is contrary to The Message is their goal. The major search engines seem to be on board with this.

This is also a major reason that comments are now dead on many websites, because giving the people who read the encrapified news are often embarrassed by that pesky Truth. Why allow comments at CNN™, when someone can come and make The Message look silly with just a few words?

Pressure has been specifically put on several sites, including Unz™, where unregulated commentors have caused Big Search to blacklist them killing their traffic from search. Oops, BIPOClist them. In the case of Zero Hedge™ (and The Federalist™), Google Ads™ were cancelled until they controlled their comments.

Yandex.com is better in many regards to Google©, even though it is Russian owned. When I did a search on Google™ for “Civil War Weather Report” – I was buried so deep that I missed it as I went by – over thirty items in front of my pages, which have nearly that exact title. On Yandex®? I’m SEVEN of the top ten results, like I used to be back before 2020, when the big political censorship bug hit all of the major search engines.

What’s the difference between bigfoot and Amber Heard? Johnny Depp never found bigfoot’s poop in his bed.

I guess that if I use Yandex© from time to time, well, then the FSB as well as the NSA will know that I’m searching for Amber Heard PEZ© dispensers. I couldn’t find a set with Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, but I did find one set consisting of Jesus, Amber Heard, and Donald Trump’s ex-lawyer, Micheal Cohen? I guess they were in a set because they all got nailed on the cross.

Well, to be fair, two of them were nailed on the cross-examination . . . .

Economic Doom? You’re Soaking In It.

“Two Purple Hearts – Leningrad and Siberia. Youngest man to be decorated by the president. You robbed the Federal Reserve Depository. Life sentence, New York Maximum Security Penitentiary. I’m ready to kick your ass out of the world, war hero.” – Escape From New York

Elon bought a coffee company and then made it a cryptocurrency. Yup, StarbuX®.

I’m a bit under the weather (sniffles). The good news is that some of the memetic content/graphs I found on the Internet about the current economy probably speak mostly for themselves. So, comments may be shorter than usual. I guess I’ll offer you this shorter post and an IOU for a longer one sometime in the future when I sober up get better.

First off – the dollar and gold used to have (depending on the era) a very similar volatility – at one point dollars were gold. What if the dollar was more volatile than gold, for the first time in 45 years??

Normally, longer term bond and notes have higher interest rates than shorter ones. The reason is uncertainty – if I was going to borrow money for thirty years, there’s more risk of crazy things happening, like Civil Wars or George Lucas selling Star Wars™ to Disney© in a thirty-year time span than in a three month time span. But when things get uncertain, that ration flips. If you look below, note that even a small inversion is a strong, strong signal of an impending recession. Well.

How bad has Biden been? Median mortgage payments (average selling price and current interest rates) are higher than Hunter Biden at a Burning Man®.

Homeowners aren’t the only ones paying huge interest payments. Here’s what’s happening on the national debt:

But it didn’t have to be that way. If someone remotely intelligent was in charge at Treasury, it wouldn’t be an issue at all. Don’t know where this snip came from, but it’s spot on:

Janet should be managing a grade school lunch kitchen. How deep does the rot run in the Banking Industrial Complex? O’Keefe tells us tons with one of his people hacks:

Thankfully the Fed™ has infinite money to lend. Or, at least the balance sheet shows that. In this case, this shows the economy as needing three times as much cash injected into the system as in 2008 to prop it all up and keep everything from draining into the abyss. In this case, the big vertical line represents the Silicon Valley Bank© failure.

That happened because Silicon Valley Bank™ had a lot of low interest, long term assets. Let’s just say I’m happy with my 4% mortgage right now, since I actually lose money by paying it back, since I can get 5%+ from banks. Silicon Valley Bank© had lots of crappy, long positions, and exploded.

Silicon Valley Bank? You’re Soaking In It.

When that happened, I wrote (link above) that I really expected that the vibrations would shake the system into a bigger failure by that October – this stuff takes a while to propagate. Instead, the Fed pulled a very cunning move: it printed buttloads of cash, allowed the banks to deposit the crap they had with the Fed™ and then the Fed™ took the losses. Of course, since they haven’t sold the crap the banks gave them, those are “realized” yet, so those losses are like a girlfriend so ugly you make her hide in the closet when your friends come over.

In addition to that, the Fed© has also lost at least $161 billion, according to the Fed©. Total? A trillion? Who knows? It’s not like anyone’s counting.

Back in the Before Time, the Fed™ never bought the debt of the United States. Why would they? They debt of the United States was to Ma and Pa Citizen, central banks all around the world, and, (oddly) to the United States when it spent the Social Security funds on Popcorn, PEZ™, Pantyhose, and Pachyderm Rides. Yup, the United States would spend the Social Security cash, and then write itself an IOU and put it (seriously!) into a filing cabinet in D.C.

Can you imagine a job that’s more futile? It’s like I wrote myself an IOU for stealing money from my kid’s college fund to buy beer, and then made my kid file the IOU, knowing full well that the file would experience “surprise combustion” in the backyard fire pit when I sobered up.

You really should be concerned. Unless you want to send me your cash so I can send you an IOU.

I promise I won’t blow it on Popcorn, PEZ™, Pantyhose, and Pachyderm Rides. Thankfully, people are waking up to the scam:

Revenge of the NEET

“I wanted to send my kids to college. It’s, like, $200 a year!” – Unfrosted

But I do have degrees in Mike Rowe Economics and Mike Rowe Biology.

NEET is Internet slang for “Not in Employment, Education, or Training” – in other words, “stays a home and smokes weed and plays video games”.

Mike Rowe, the Dirty Jobs guy, spent time noting last year that even with unemployment below 4%, 7 million men between the ages of 25 and 54 aren’t in the work force at all.

Now, I would hate to bring up the points that if our nation:

sends all the factory jobs overseas,
imports millions of foreigners with H1B visas (95,000 a year, minimum, since 2006, and more going back before that), or
just like Google®, cut hundreds of highly-skilled technical jobs in the United States and offshore them to Mexico and India,

then maybe, just maybe, the job market actually sucks because the wages are depressed to the point where living conditions at those wage levels are literally third world.

They’re not send us their best, or their best navigators, but I wonder if the repairs will be riveting. (meme used with permission)

Why would people put up with that? The market.

An example I read recently was of a person from India claiming that the only way they could find a place to live (this was in Canada) was in a bed in a kitchen in a two-bedroom apartment where six other Indian families were living. Admittedly, this is probably an upgrade from living in a slum in Mumbai, but these six families each pay a sixth of the rent. If a typical Canadian family wanted to rent that apartment and each Indian family was making $300 payments, the Canadians would have to cough up $1800.

That’s why people are tenting it – tents are better (marginally) to the American psyche than living with six other families in a condition where “squalor” would be an upgrade.

Another example?

When I was a kid, delivery work was for kids. Sixteen-year-olds were the ones frying Big Macs® and driving pizza from the Pizza Den to people’s houses.

Now?

Doordash® is now an adult job and everyone I see running the windows of the fast-food places has been voting for a big chunk of this century.

The United States is slipping quickly (and then, I fear, all at once) into a third world economy. To be clear, I’m not blaming those attempting to get to a better place, but it would be magical thinking to believe that once they got here and were a majority that they’d not immediately turn the United States into just another version of their homeland. You know, the one they fled.

Biden can’t stop doing connect-the-dot puzzles even though he can’t finish one. I guess Biden just doesn’t know where to draw the line. (meme as found)

But some of them aren’t working at all. And of those men that aren’t working, a huge number of them are white guys. It turns out that all, and I mean all, of the job growth since Corona™ became something other than a beer, went to dudes that weren’t white. In fact, the number of white people in the workforce dropped while Joe Biden “created” all of these jobs.

They were replaced. On any job where there is a remotely credible alternative with some sort of “diversity” score based on: a sexual fetish, being “female”, missing one of their six spleens, race, ethnicity, or religion. Of course, white, Christian and male is the opposite of diverse even though that category is only 6% or less of all of the humans we know of in the Solar System, excluding Phobos.

With things like Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) actively putting up barriers to hiring (or keeping) white guys, I’m not surprised that many have just given up. They are pretending right now that that DEI is going away, but in reality, they’re keeping it but just naming it other things. “People and the Planet,” anyone? (Yes, it’s real.) Their goals really haven’t changed.

A lot of companies have women as DEI executives. I guess because it’s cheaper. (meme as found)

The big problem is that Identity is now more important than Competency. Think: Chernobyl 2.0, brought to you by DEI. Why no DEI in the NFL®? People actually care about meritocracy in football players, I guess.

Also, Automation is real. Factories of almost any type, when compared by their counterparts of 1960, are much more highly automated. A guy named Fred walking around to check temperatures on thermometers to make sure the boiler doesn’t suddenly wipe Peoria off the map has been replaced with sensors that feed pressure, temperature, and flowrates back to computers that automate the process. Fred’s out of a job, and, if those boiler automation systems weren’t programmed in India (looking at you, Boeing®) then Peoria is still safe.

Except for Fred, who doesn’t have that job anymore. A.I. is coming for lots and lots of other jobs. Starting now. According to Indeed®:

Software development jobs are down 51.3%,
Information Design down 44.3%
IT Operations and Helpdesk down 33.5%
Industrial Engineering down 30.3%

Are all of these jobs replaceable by A.I.? Of course not. But 35.3% of HR jobs (same study) apparently are.

I’m not a NEET, but I’m sure it’s easier being a NEET without a family. No particular requirement to have shelter other than couch surfing, and some NEETs work for a couple of months during the year and then goof off, smoke weed, and play video games during the rest of the time.

And you can do both of these things in a video game, while stoned. (meme as found)

Families have always been the nucleus that keeps men showered and shaved, but without them, men give up. It’s not like they can afford a family, either. Housing prices and interest rates are now high enough in most metro locations that most young families are effectively locked out of homeownership. The price to income ratio has doubled since 1985 nationally – homes are now twice as expensive as 1985 compared to median family incomes. Add in 7%+ interest rates, and you’ll see why the middle class has caused Red Lobster to go bankrupt.

Who knew we’d live to see so many movies come true? (meme as found)

In reality, there’s not a labor shortage – there’s only a labor shortage at the wages companies are willing to pay, and a ludicrous inflation of the value of women so that what they bring to the table (for kids) doesn’t equal what they have to put. NEETs don’t really care about either. They’ve got their weed, couches, and video games.

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

“That’s them! They knocked us out and stole our space suits!” – Dude, Where’s My Car?

How does a crab cross the street? It uses a sidewalk.

The future isn’t what it used to be.

Going back in time, the future as envisioned by the 50s, 60s, and even the 70s was pretty cool. There were flying cars, jetpacks, and a world that was cleaner and more convenient filled with abundant energy that would be too cheap to meter – and humanity would soon be headed outward to the planets, at the very least. I believe that’s because that’s where the hot alien women in bikini space suits are kept.

That didn’t happen, or at least hasn’t happened yet. Pa Wilder was born after World War I, but still within spitting distance of the first time people flew in the rickety plane that Orville and Wilber tossed together. By the time he finished his government-funded all-expenses-paid European vacation in 1945, jet engines had already screamed over Europe, ballistic missiles had crossed into space on their way toward delivering urgent packages to London.

Jet airliners and satellites followed, and before Pa Wilder hit fifty, man was walking on the Moon.

And his favorite eel? That’s a moray.

Amazing progress, by any stretch of the imagination. But what (at the individual level) has changed since, say, 1981?

Let’s put computers aside (for a moment). I know that’s like wanting to talk about the life of O.J. Simpson but just skip that one little detail. Life in 2024 would be utterly comprehensible to Pa Wilder of 1981, especially if he never looked at a cellphone or a tablet or a computer.

The big advances in basic applied engineering seemed to stop around 1970. Heck, in some ways, they’ve regressed – it’s not really possible to get on an SST and jet to London in a few hours going faster than the speed of sound unless you’re in the .mil club. We’re also tinkering with going back to the Moon, but seemed to have lost the directions since Buzz Aldrin left them in his other spacesuit.

“I am Buzz Aldrin, I’ve been on the Moon. Neil before me!”

One of the reasons that progress in a lot of conventional technology has slowed down or stopped is that progress is always easiest at the front end. The Wright Flyer? It sucked. But after flight was proven, people lined up to improve it. Radio? It sucked, too, just dots and dashes until AM and then FM were plucked (by very smart people) from the aether, leading also to television in very short order.

Unfortunately, television also led to The View and Keeping Up With the Kardashians, so there’s at least some argument that Philo T. Farnsworth could be held liable for war crimes.

The biggest and most important refinements to a new technology often come soonest.

But that’s not the only reason technological development slows. Nowadays, experimenting has become too hard because failure is no longer an acceptable outcome. A prime example of this is Elon Musk’s SpaceX® versus NASA. Elon makes more progress in an “old” field in a month than NASA does in a year because he watches things blow up and smiles because he knows that his team will have learned something new about why stuff broke.

Space is hard, but it’s a thousand times harder if you have to continually guess what will go wrong rather than test, and that slows progress. Nuclear power may be an exception here, since we only need so many Godzillas® and Gameras™ to fight off dangerous kaiju, like Michelle Obama or Amy Schumer.

What do you find between Godzilla’s toes? Slow Japanese people.

As I mentioned, Pa Wilder of 1981 would be quite comfy and unsurprised by the world of 2024 with the exception of information technology and telecommunications, which, aside from financial shenanigans, has received the greatest amount of investment of any single industry since 1981.

What would the biggest changes be for him?

Well, duh, computers, telecommunications, and their influence on the world.

It has transformed businesses in fundamental ways. Walmart®’s secret sauce wasn’t just cheap Chinese merchandise – nope. It was also the information tech that allowed them to manage the purchasing and logistics of a business with a supply chain that spanned multiple continents. The time was ready for that particular innovation: if it hadn’t been Walmart©, it would have been some other company.

Pa Wilder would not be very comfortable with the pace of social media. Also, I think that he would be very, very concerned with the advances in Artificial Intelligence, but enough about the chairman of the Federal Reserve®.

Pa was the president of a very small farm bank as computer terminals began to replace the paper ledgers that they used to track accounts, so he was familiar the changes that he was seeing in banking that in, but taking it from that level to the idea of “all the information anywhere, immediately available” was never something he quite got. Of course, it probably didn’t help that he used a 28.8kb modem and there were only something like 24 lines(!) from his county to the AT&T© office the next county over.

Yes. 28 lines. It wasn’t like everybody would be calling all at once, right? That was, however, the time that we ran for the phone in my house, since calls were rare, and you really wanted to see who it was. Now? I have the data equivalent of 10,000 old phone lines coming to my house.

We certainly don’t have jetpacks or flying cars, but we do have an information explosion that is unparalleled in history. That being said, we’re probably pretty near the limits for conventional computing power based on the limits of physics and energy density, and I’m not sure that quantum computing isn’t just a meme.

Is the next big field genetics?

What do you get when you cross a duck and a pig? A media exposé about the lack of ethics in genetic engineering.

Advances in things like CRISPR and genomic sequencing have come about because of the advances in information processing, and we are, perhaps, at the cusp of the A.I. world where things could get very, very interesting indeed in just a few years. Maybe the scientists and A.I. working together with CRISPR can even find a way to turn plant matter into protein. You know, like a chicken.

Or maybe they’ll finally locate the hot alien women in bikini space suits?

Forbidden Science: I.Q. And The Industrial Revolution

“For going against his forbidden rules of old!” – The Mist

Are protestants in love otherwise known as Popeless romantics?

I’m going to start off with a happy note, Concerned American, from Western Rifle Shooters Association isn’t done, and he’s up over at Cold Fury (LINK) until he gets things ironed out at his normal place (LINK) which is up periodically.

Last Monday when talking about Forbidden Science, I included the following paragraphs:

The Soviets started a fox breeding program to try to understand the interplay of genetics and behavior. Within six generations, there were foxes that actually liked people and wagged their tails. Now, this program is some 50 generations in, and the foxes actually seek people, and, though still foxes, behave and act like dogs.

The aboriginals in Australia were separated from the rest of humanity (mostly) for 2500 generations. It has been 101 generations since the birth of Christ, so imagine how living in cities has changed us from what we were? In Great Britain, virtually all of the poor people living 500 years ago died out due to economic selection, and the vast majority of folks are descended from the aristocracy.

I was questioned in the comments about the very last sentence, so I wanted to put it into context by making sure the rest of the “stuff” was around it, because the conclusion that comes from this is yet more Forbidden Science.

Do these genes make me look fat?

How do I know this? The book in question is A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World by Gregory Clark. How do I know that it’s Forbidden Science?

Despite many news articles at the time, it took a bit of searching to find the source – as the joke goes, where’s the best place to hide a body? On the third page of Google® results. (FYI, I don’t actually use Google™ since they censor me) After a bit, I finally found it.
On the Wikipedia® page about the book, there’s almost three times as much content attacking the book and the author as there is a description of the thesis of the book. There’s a line here about protesting too much . . . .

Since it’s Forbidden, Clark’s basic idea is this:

Back before the industrial revolution hit, Great Britain had no real safety nets for the poor. Have too many kids so you can’t feed them all? Guess you’d better start picking favorites. In real terms, however, if someone was poor, they were more likely to get sick.

But this man clearly plays bass.

Why? The food wasn’t as nutritious or plentiful for a poor person, same as forever. Houses (if they even had one) were cold and often filthy, unless they were too poor to even be able to afford filth.

I remember driving through some city with The Mrs. once, and I said, “Well, this would be a nice place to live, if you were rich.” The Mrs. responded to my stupid comment like a pit bull on a toddler: “John, any place is nice to live if you’re rich.”

Without a social safety net, everyplace sucks if you’re poor. Great Britain was no exception. There are, however, implications and consequences to being poor. The poor were less likely to marry – many bloodlines just evaporated because the men and women were too miserable or had such bad hygiene that they couldn’t get together and get it on.

The poor also die earlier before they have as many kids, and if they die earlier, their kids are maybe out of luck, since they can’t be sold into medical experimentation because medicine then consisted of bloodletting.

If you eat Ramen with ketchup for sauce, it tastes just like poverty.

So, the poor don’t have as many kids. But the poor kids also die more often. This isn’t the world of 2024 where we encourage poverty by subsidizing it, so pre-industrial Great Britain is the exact opposite of the movie Idiocracy: the rich and the successful have more kids and start replacing the poor people who didn’t show up. Thus, the poor that remain are getting smarter.

While being rich is not perfectly correlated to being smart, it’s close. It’s also not perfectly correlated to greater degrees of the ability to defer pleasure, but it’s close. The Stanford marshmallow experiment was a test where kids were brought in and offered one marshmallow now, but if they could wait 15 minutes, they’d get two marshmallows. Those who could wait had better SAT scores, education and income later in life. And, we all know the difference between camping and being homeless: marshmallows.

Crimes were also punished much more severely compared to today – and (unless you were on the wrong side of Henry VIII) most of them weren’t political, but were for theft. Yup, one estimate is that 70% plus of executions were for theft. And although the numbers were only 200 a year out of a population of 8,000,000 or so million (think 1770s) the children of those people didn’t show up, because they were never born.

If Henry VIII had invented the airplane, he would have been an alti-Tudor.

Up until the Industrial Revolution changed the game, the social pressures in Great Britain favored an increase in intelligence, and an increase in civilized behaviors. It’s very likely that these civilizational pressures made the Industrial Revolution possible by helping people in Great Britain become clever enough to start it.

The Industrial Revolution started to improve the lives of everyone in Great Britain, and the (now smarter) poor didn’t die so often, even after they were fired from clock factories for putting all those extra hours in.

As these pressures disappear, there is strong idea that IQ can go down. It looks like the world (and the United States) is in the midst of a reverse Flynn effect (LINK). To put it bluntly, we are very likely in the midst of the plot of Idiocracy. So, remember, Brawndo® has what plants crave!

Thanks for asking the question, and I hope this covered it.

Forbidden Economics: The GloboLeft Versus The Good

“Out these windows, we will view the collapse of financial history. One step closer to economic equilibrium.” – Fight Club

My neighbor has had a bad financial crisis. He has to drive a car without a top and his car doesn’t have a roof.

Monday’s post was about Forbidden Science. These are inconvenient truths that simply don’t fit into the ideology of a GloboLeftist. In the tradition of the very best GloboLeftists, whenever this inconvenient set of facts conflicts with their ideology, they do what rational people have always done – they consult how the facts disagree with their ideology and change their positions. Nah, just kidding. Instead GloboLeftists ignore them and stick their fingers in their ears and yell loudly “I’m not listening to you! I’m not listening to you! I’m not listening to you!”

Wednesday is the day I typically post about economics and related issues, so what better topic than Forbidden Economics? Just like on Monday, I’ll start with things that the GloboLeft actually believes and then make fun of them, primarily because they deserve it.

Me? I say bring back the positive power of bullying.

I was a bully to this orphan kid in school. I mean, it wasn’t like he was going to tell his parents.

GloboLeftists believe that Modern Monetary Theory isn’t just made-up justification for “I spend what I want”.

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has quietly taken the place of any sort of rational thinking. When I first wrote about it, it seemed so fringe and tongue in cheek that I was shocked anyone smarter than AOC would fall for it. I know, I know, that leaves about 85% of the country, but the GloboLeft has willingly and enthusiastically embraced MMT.

What is MMT? It’s the theory that, since money is entirely made up in the first place, that it doesn’t matter how much you print. Yes, you read that correctly. The idea is that money is like points in a football game. When a team scores a touchdown, there aren’t some vat of points that are decreased to add points to that team’s score. Instead, they’re made up. The limit to the number of points that can be scored in a game is based entirely on the productivity of the teams.

If we reset to zero every day and all played NFL® football, well, that might make sense. In MMT, the idea is that extra cash is just soaked up via taxation rather than the game ending.

What happens when the score keeps going up from game to game.

But the GloboLeftElite really, really don’t like to be taxed. As much as Warren Buffett complains that he’s not taxed enough, the one thing Warren never, ever does is send more than he owes in taxes in voluntarily. In fact, he has fleets of lawyers working every angle possible so that he pays the least amount in taxes possible. (Note: If Donald Trump were to try this he would be tried for felony tax evasion.)

There are two types of people in this world: Those who can find an answer through simple deduction.

This is not a new thing. It really started under W., and has continued through Obama, Trump, and Biden.

But what could go wrong?

GloboLeftists believe that women are cheated in the workplace, earning less than men.

I’ll start by reminding everyone that GloboLeftists don’t even know what a woman is, to the point that a sitting Supreme Court Justice was unable to define what a woman was during her Senate confirmation hearings, and sits on the Supreme Court.

However . . .

The reality is that women actually make more than men when their wages are controlled for things like, oh, career choice, amount of overtime put in, time taken off to have children, et cetera. The idea is so simplistic in that it takes everyone, puts them in a bag, and says that the average man makes X, and the average woman makes 0.8X.

Yes. That’s true. But when I went to a college graduation several years ago and they called out the engineers, 90% plus were men in some fields, and in no engineering field were women even close to a majority.

And they both give sound advice.

I wonder if that could be partially a reason for a pay difference?

Nah. Sexism is easier, and if people will swallow MMT, they’ll swallow anything. I mean, we already knew that about Kamala.

GloboLeftists believe that increasing a labor supply won’t decrease wages.

Immigration is an amazing source of brain rot for GloboLeftists. They think that bringing in hordes of illegal aliens won’t drop the price of unskilled labor. Now, not for one minute do I believe that’s the case, and neither do the people (the GloboLeftElite) that are feeding those thoughts to the rank and file.

But lower labor costs mean higher profits, so why not bring in not only illegal aliens, but tons of people on H1-B visas to take the jobs that Americans had – the number of stories of people showing up to work only to be forced to train their replacements to “earn” their severance package is so common as to be boring. It doesn’t even make the news anymore.

Yet the flip side is that they also don’t think that raising the minimum wage will have any impact on prices?

As found.

The last belief that I’m going to touch on that the GloboLeft has is this: history has nothing to teach us about the danger of an irreligious society basted in feminism and socialism.

Hey, wait, do you hear someone yelling “I’m not listening to you! I’m not listening to you! I’m not listening to you!”?

I’m sure it’s not just me. You can hear that, right?

Oh, and as a follow up to Monday’s post, here is NASA’s Administrator. He believes the far side of the Moon is always dark. Really.