Economics as a verb 2
NSR has a feature on illegal immigrants working in the dairy industry. As usual NSR defends the interests of the super-rich, claiming that dairy farmers haven't been able to hire natives.

One of the immigrants said that he was happy with the money he earned, because he was able to support his family back home and buy land in his village.

Hmm. Maybe if you paid natives enough that they could live on the farm, support their family, and buy land, they might be willing to take the job.

It's similar in other industries. Software companies pay Hindoos about half of what they pay natives, and the Hindoos are happy with the money because they can support a large family back home and hire cooks and nannies for their family.

Hmm again. Maybe if you paid native programmers enough to support a large family and hire domestic servants, you'd have less trouble finding natives to work.

The problem is obvious. Currency conversion is fraudulent. Currency values are based on arbitrary government decisions and the greed of speculators. If currencies were based strictly on labor value, these imbalances would disappear.

Since that isn't going to happen, the best cure is to simply eliminate all cross-boundary dealing in labor. No importation of human laborers, no importation of labor hours. If you want to sell anything in America, 100% of the labor must be done by Americans. The only exception is raw materials that can't be grown or mined here, such as bananas or lanthanum. Growing and mining involve labor in the countries where the materials are grown; since there's no substitute for the material, an exception is needed for those labor hours.

Another argument for economics as a verb.

Labels: Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 8:12 AM

  1930 as a verb
I've been unconvinced by the usual explanations of the 1930s Depression, but I don't have a good alternative explanation yet. Just thinking out loud here, trying to apply the ideas of economics as a verb or Islamic economics........

A clear statement of the usual story from a nicely written article by Matt Yglesias:

The embedded meaning here: The Depression occurred because the Federal Reserve of the time had allowed widespread bank failures to sharply reduce the amount of money circulating in the country. This shortage of currency led to falling prices, which became a vicious cycle. With prices headed downward, everyone wanted to defer business investments and major purchases as far into the future as possible. That only increased the excess demand for money and intensified the cycle of deflation. The lesson was clear—at all costs, prevent a spiral of bank failures, currency shortage, and falling prices. Get that done, and the system will return to equilibrium.

I don't buy it.

First, the trouble started long before 1930. Like most other world problems, it really started in or around WW1. Farmers were encouraged by speculators to overproduce, and many people went into farming who didn't know what they were doing. They borrowed to buy unsuitable land, grew one bad crop, then abandoned the land after denuding it. Result was the Dust Bowl, which ruined even good farms, and lots of bankruptcies in farming areas. The false farmland blew away, leaving only the real land. In areas that weren't covered with dust, careful farmers continued to grow good crops with the usual ups and downs of farming.

Similar overborrowing, speculation and overproduction happened in housing and other areas of business during the '20s.

The problem wasn't deflation in the sense described by Yglesias; it wasn't a lack of real value, but a sudden and drastic removal of false value. Ordinary people had become accustomed to the wealth effect, a sense of ever-increasing prosperity, and didn't realize they were dealing in counterfeit. When the counterfeit blew away, leaving only the real value, people who had borrowed were in serious trouble with the banks. They couldn't pay back the false dollars they had borrowed because the false foundation of the false dollars had disappeared with the stock crash. Of course the banks didn't care if the dollars were real or false; bankers only know numbers.

And the problem certainly wasn't a lack of investment. I'm familiar with the auto and radio industries. Both put tremendous effort and money into developing new products during the '30s, and it helped to some extent. Careful companies like Nash hadn't engaged in borrowing and speculation, so they were able to invest from savings. Others found ways to borrow. Marginal companies failed, but not because of a value shortage. Some failed because they had been supplying overpriced luxury cars to overextended borrowers, some were just weak operations who would have failed anyway.

The parallel to the 1990-2008 false value expansion is clear, but the NONparallel of official response may not be obvious.

FDR did four big things.

(1) He allowed false value to collapse back to real value. He allowed investors to fail and closed bad banks. He stopped the production of false value.

(2) He enacted severe regulations to prevent false value makers from resuming their counterfeiting.

(3) He helped ordinary people, repeat ORDINARY FUCKING PEOPLE, get through the collapse with public jobs.

(4) The public jobs served a specific purpose. Admittedly some were pure makework ("We Piss Around" was often a valid insult!) but most were building a foundation for a restoration of real production. Hydro dams and electric lines, sewer systems, road systems, schools, libraries, public buildings, farm improvements, training for farmers. Without those infrastructure elements, America would not have been able to expand real production after the '30s.

In short, he stopped current counterfeiting, prevented future counterfeiting, and used public money to improve the future real productivity of the country. WPA wages were real value.



Bushobama and their Brit counterparts have done the EXACT OPPOSITE at every step. They did nothing to stop counterfeiting, they are pouring infinite amounts of newly counterfeited dollars into expanding bad banks and expanding the counterfeiters, and they are not investing in new infrastructure. By continuing 'free trade' policies and EPA enviroterrorism, they are strongly discouraging real production by real companies.

If we learned from the start to distinguish real value from false value, we'd be harder to fool. If schools followed the Real Manual Training model, or some valid modern equivalent, kids would know real value in their bones and muscles. They couldn't be distracted by mere numbers.

= = = = =

Followup here.

Labels: Natural law = Sharia law, the broken circle

  ¶ 3:55 PM

  Economics as a verb 3
Following on this line of thought.

Big discussion of income inequality today, based on a new poll. Mentions the stereotypical right and left views: Right says ZERO TAXES to make the economy grow, lift all boats. Left says MORE STIMULUS, redistribute false value arbitrarily to the Left's currently defined aristocrats.

We've tried both separately and simultaneously. They don't work because most of the "value" is not Real Value. It's arbitrary numbers typed in by the Chosen Ones through keyboards like the Federal Reserve and LIBOR. The keyboards were created by the Chosen Ones to serve their own purposes, and no alterations in taxes or welfare will change the fact that these are NUMBERS WITHOUT VALUE. These mechanisms run faultlessly to increase the nominal riches of the Chosen Ones, without affecting Real Value in the slightest.

Rising tide can lift more boats if the tide is Real Value, and if the real value is being created by the people in the boats. The water analogy fails at this point, so I'll get down to the verb stuff.

Consider the original meaning of interest. It's a verb.

Inter-est. He is among. He takes part. He has a share.

In concrete form: He plows his land and plants crops. She grinds the wheat and bakes bread. He sells the bread and delivers it. All of these people are among this one line of value-creation. All take part in the increase. All have a share of the creating, and all receive a share of the money paid for the final product.

All of these boats are in the water of Real Value, and all benefit when the Real Value in this particular reservoir rises. When the bread feeds the customers well enough that they feel like having more kids, there's more need for bread. More need for wheat and grinding and baking and selling and delivering. Nobody is standing on the shore betting on the rise. Nobody is getting paid to blame Evil KKKarbon for the rising tide.

The existing analogies are wrong because they refer almost entirely to the bettor and the blamer. Growth means increasing activity at the Betting Parlor and increasing activity in the Church of Blame. (Of course we use different words: we call the betting parlor "The Dow" and we call the Church of Blame "insurance.")

Labels: Blinded by Stats, Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 5:16 PM

  Gresham vs Graybill vs Bitcoin, reprinted.
Looking at the latest shit about Bitcoin, I thought "Hey, I should write about this in terms of Economics As A Verb." Then I realized I'd already done it. So I'll just republish or pop the earlier item as is.

= = = = = START REPRINT:

Returning again to Graybill's Law:

The people of Free-Trade countries are therefore driven into the few occupations which are left, by reason of the destruction of their formerly more varied pursuits. Hence those diversified talents with which men are endowed are not developed but remain latent and unused, an incalculable detriment to the prosperity of their respective countries.

Let's try to expand the notion of skill-estate.

News item about the alleged developer of Bitcoin got me thinking about Gresham's Law.

The last time we had two INDEPENDENT AND COMPETING currencies was before 1870. Since then we've had one currency .... until Bitcoin. I had a hard time grasping Gresham until Bitcoin.

What Gresham really says is this: If two items both claim to be currency, and one of the items becomes much more valuable, the valuable item will NO LONGER BE A CURRENCY. It will become a COLLECTIBLE like vintage wine or classic cars. And that's Bitcoin. It claimed to be a currency until its value rose quickly. At that point it became Picassos.

But the current Bitcoin system doesn't even qualify as a collectible asset, because it requires ALL OF THE HOLDERS of the asset to give permission for every transaction. The permission is automatic through computers and nets, but it's still permission.

Bitcoin is not a thing you can buy or sell openly and freely. Thus it's not even PROPERTY. More like a trust-based inheritance.

= = = = =

Now think of currency in a dynamic way.

A coin represents a DELTA of value. If you have HONESTLY acquired a coin, it means you have INCREASED THE VALUE of something. You have cut down a tree, or turned the tree into paper, or helped to print a book with the paper, or arranged books attractively in a store to raise the sale price.

We can apply Gresham as a verb to the Graybill world of SKILLS as delta-makers.

The skill that yields the greatest number of coins for a given amount of effort will become a collectible, no longer freely transferred.

What's the highest-value skill? Counterfeiting. Money as pure numbers. What's the SKILL or EFFORT that creates counterfeit money? No skill at all, just access to the treasury. If you belong to the correct tribe you have access to counterfeit money. It's an inherited trust from the start!

Among other traditional skills, what's the lowest-value? Farming. Requires long ownership of property and generations of skill development. Payoff depends on weather, speculators, and the actions of other farmers. BUT farming is critically important to the existence of civilization, so a sane civilization takes steps to subsidize farmers.

Most other skills are in the middle. Pottery, welding, weaving, programming, cooking, selling. These are available to anyone with some innate talent, but the genetic aspect is non-exclusive. Doesn't depend on your name. You can learn them in a year or two of apprenticeship.

These skills qualify as currency. They can be transferred freely to anyone who can use them, and they can be used freely by the recipient. The resulting delta of value depends on all sorts of internal and external factors that don't apply to simple coins, but the basic idea is still the same.

Because these skills can be acquired (comparatively) easily, they don't need subsidies... BUT a sane civilization will take steps to maintain their value, just as it maintains the value of coins.

And there's the link between Gresham and Graybill. Our insane "civilization" is depriving ordinary skills of all value. Hyperinflation of skill currency, leaving ONLY ledger money, aristocrat money, vintage money, with any value. The only skill that counts is the skill of being born into the correct ethnic group.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

Labels: Make or break, skill-estate

  ¶ 7:59 AM

  Language update for -ft


Professor Polistra does a poor imitation of Comrade Bacall as she brings us a thought about grammatical living fossils, plus a few newly noted word-turds.

= = = = = Newly noted = = = = =

Background in incarceration:

Fresh PC euphemism from Satan's best mediabitch KXLY.

"She has a background in incarceration and other challenges."

Or in non-satanese: "She is a troublemaker with a criminal record."

= = = = =

TurnOfTheCenturyByWhichIMean2000Not1900:

This is like MeenMarTheCountryFormerlyKnownAsBurma. The phrase turn of the century means 1900. Permanent mapping. Hard-wired. Can't be changed. When you try to use it for 2000, you generate unneeded confusion which always requires an explicit explanation. Easy solution: If you mean the year 2000 but don't want to say two thousand for some stupid reason, say the millenium. That phrase has been remapped, because the first millenium happened before most written history and literature.

Odd inconsistency: While we feel the need to misuse hundred-year-old terms for one particular year, we've abandoned the hundred-year-old decade names. The '00 decade never found a proper name, which apparently broke the habit. Now we're halfway through a decade that has an unambiguous name from the previous century (the Teens) but we never say it.

Later addon: Another pair of 'marooned in time' words is prewar/postwar. On paper these should apply to every war, but in fact they apply exclusively to WW2. In this case there's more involved than the semi-regular operation of language. All of USA STRONG's wars since 1945 have been subsections of one continuous and eternal war. You can find a start for each unprovoked invasion, but the starts are so close together and so frequent that pre- is meaningless. It's like marking off a pre-breath and during-breath for each breath you take. And you can't find an end at all because each of these sub-wars is specifically designed to go on forever.


= = = = =

Survey:

Doesn't mean a survey. When it's done by Climate Murderers, survey means "completely faked computer model formatted to look like a survey". Just like their definitions of science, logic, and data.

= = = = =

Free-range kids:

Retronym. Used to be kids. Now we need a special word to denote kids who are raised humanely and sanely, just as we need a special word for chickens who are raised humanely and sanely.

= = = = = Living fossil = = = = =

Thrift:

Prof P was observing an attempted 'urban farmstead' in her neighborhood. The 'urban farmers' are hard-working but they don't have a green thumb. They planted about 25 fruit trees in their front yard several years ago, and the trees aren't doing well. Half are dead, and the others simply haven't ... throven? Haven't thruv? Thrave? Thraften? Thrift?

Aha!

Thrift is the result-noun of thrive. Thrift is what happens when you're thriving, and thrift is what enables you to keep thriving in bad times. Nature understands this connection, and natural economics is purely based on this connection!

English is full of result-nouns that fit this pattern. [Noun] is what happens when you're [Verb]ing. Result-nouns were formerly a living part of the grammatical system. Now the formative impulse is gone, but the nouns remain. Lots of them end in -ft.

Some are still solidly connected to their verbs, as in theft from thieving or draft from draw or gift from give.

Some of the verbs have obsolesced, like reeve/rift; some of the nouns have obsolesced, like weave/weft.

Thrift and drift and heft came a-drift from thrive and drive and heave. Noun and verb are both current, but we don't feel the connection. In the case of thrift, this is unfortunate.

Labels: Language update, Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 1:33 AM

  Can't read that shit
Listening this afternoon to Test Kitchen, the only modern radio program I make a point of hearing every week. I never use their fancy recipes, but there's always something interesting and there's never anything annoying or lethal. It's a positive contribution to culture.

This week featured an interview with Ron Finley, who calls himself the Guerrilla Gardener. He's attempting to spread the gospel of the soil in places that need it most. 100 years ago, the poor parts of town could have taught these lessons to the rich parts; now, thanks to 50 years of LBJ's welfare and Betty Friedman's feminism and Milton Friedman's financialism, it's the other way around.

Finley does presentations to schools where he passes out bags of fast-food snacks and tells the kids "Don't open the bag. Read the bag." Some hapless kid will try to read it out loud. "Sugar, salt, di-pro-gly-can't read any more."

Finley then says "If you can't read that shit, don't eat that shit."

It's excellent advice. Strikes me just now that the obverse side of the sentence is equally good.

If you can write that shit, it means you've made that shit. Di-poly-gly-whatever can be precisely named because it's SYNTHETIC. It was produced by a specified sequence of reactions, mixings, catalysts, etc.

If you can't write it, you didn't make it. Nature made it.

We still can't write the NATURAL contents of food. The only honest way of listing the ingredients of a tomato is

Tomato.



We know in a reductionist sense what's in a tomato: we can weigh the atoms of carbon, oxygen, phosphorus, iron, etc. And we know a little bit of the chemical compounds: sugars, ascorbic acid, nicotine, etc.

But we're just beginning to realize (or re-realize) that Tomato and Parsnip and Bacon are VERBS, not nouns. And we're just barely beginning to parse those verbs. (Can I resist saying "parse the parsnip"? No.)

At the front end of the verb: Epigenetics hints strongly that the mood of the plant at harvest, or the mood of the animal at slaughter, determines the quality of the fruit or meat. We're especially retarded in diagramming this morpheme, because God already gave us the proper grammar. Kosher, halal, "astrological" harvest rules.

In the next part: Color and smell alert our salivary glands and stomach glands. Chewing signals the brain both mechanically and via the trigeminal nerve. Each gland then knows which enzymes to pour out and which chemicals to absorb.

In the last part: Our bacterial organs finish the processing and ingestion, learn epigenetically about the quality of the contents, and inform us by altering our mood.

All verb from start to finish. Mood to food to mood, with an infinite amount of action and excitement along the way.

Most of this fragmentary knowledge is extremely old and extremely new. The halal/astrology knowledge, direct from God via long painful experimentation, is 50,000 years old. The specifics of epigenetics and bacteria are just 10 years old.

Between those poles we passed through a terrible era of dead[ly] certainty and dead[ly] nounism. We believed with 100.00000% precision that our reductionist analysis was perfect.

Some parts of science have opened their eyes and ears and noses and hands in the last 10 years, and are busy confessing what they should have been confessing all along: We are ignorant fuckheads. Remember what we said about cholesterol? We were wrong. Remember what we said about cancer screening? We were wrong.

This advice is jarring but necessary. Before we can [re]learn the verbs we have to banish the nouns.

Other parts of science are still cranking out the same old synthetic nouns, adding new epicyclic syllables to their big words and getting multisyllabic sums of nominal money in return. Global warming, economics, cosmology, quantum, "social" "science".

These charlatans can read that shit, because they wrote that shit. Synthesized it from pure theory.

Labels: Carbon Cult, Experiential education, Grand Blueprint, Smarty-plants

  ¶ 5:17 PM

  Economics as a verb
In any area you examine, our current idiocy stems from the fallacy of reification. In some cases we think of a word as being reality; in others we think of a number as being reality; in others we think of an arbitrary unit of measure as being reality.

Word: In all aspects of politics we've lost the reality of offering different sets of actions. We no longer have a tension between opposing parties pulling in opposite directions. Both "parties" pull in the same direction, loyally following Goldman's commands; and both "parties" have fierce "robust debates" about sets of words and slogans that have zero connection to reality. [Nice example today. NPR interviewed some voters in Ohio. The Romney voters all wanted Romney "because he talks about God." Not because he will do anything different; just because he includes one fucking word in his randomly spouted sloganmix.]

Number: Quantum "physics" has abandoned all contact with reality. New "discoveries" are terms in complex equations. We spend billions on machines that force protons into completely unnatural conditions, in order to "prove" the "existence" of these numbers in equations. The machines can't tell us anything about nature, because their exact job is to create a situation that never occurs in nature. And of course climate "science" doesn't even bother to build machines for counternatural experiments. It just plays with numbers and requires mass murder to decrease one particular number.

Unit of measure: We get locked into booms and busts, inflations and deflations, because we forget that our measuring unit is only a measure. In Alan Watts's famous metaphor, a carpenter wouldn't stop work because he "ran out of inches", so we shouldn't stop work because we "ran out of dollars" or "ran out of liquidity".

Modern bankers have developed a monstrous structure of pure units depending on other pure units depending on other pure units, losing all possible contact with any actual underlying value. Options are literally and explicitly bets on the value of numbers, identical to the operation of a football pool. The difference, of course, is that we don't force nations to collapse when a football pool gets too large. We force nations to collapse when an option pool gets too large.

= = = = =

At its origin, economics seemed to understand this distinction. Early Catholic and Islamic thinkers saw labor as the key component of value. Islam went farther, declaring that any attempt to place value on abstract numbers (i.e. paying interest) is a sort of idolatry.

I'm proposing one more step. Treat everything, animate or inanimate, carpenter or car, as activities instead of things. Treat everything as a source of labor. Why is a carpenter worth money? Because he works for you, doing things you can't or won't do. Why is a car worth money? Because it works for you, doing things you can't or won't do.

= = = = =

This would not lead to a different set of economic equations. Instead, it would simply eliminate the whole fraudulent notion that you can condense human behavior into a closed-form equation.

= = = = =

I can imagine a few specific consequences at the moment:

(1) Delegitimize statistics. Don't use stats for any important purpose. Stats are designed to remove the time element and the relational element, leading to all sorts of evil thinking. Wave-type analysis represents the verbs of reality much better, but still doesn't capture the transitivity of verbs.

(2) Delegitimize idolatry of numbers. If you want to bet on something, you should do it in a clearly illegitimate environment. Currently we have a weird disjunction between two rackets: Betting on numbers related to stocks is run by the Jew Mafia, with total governmental approval and assistance. Betting on numbers related to sports is run by the Italian and Indian Mafias, with no pretense of legitimacy. Under the present system, if you lose your shirt betting on stock numbers, Ben 'Bugsy' Bernanke will make up your losses and give you a few trillion as reward; but if you lose your shirt betting on horse numbers, Guido 'Lefty' Salvatore or Ernest 'Two Dogs' Runs-with-bear will break your legs. We should put Lefty and Two Dogs in charge of stock-based betting as well. Much more efficient and honest.

(3) In foreign trade, treat labor and stuff on the same plane. Impose tariffs on stuff that comes from China, AND impose tariffs on labor performed in India, AND impose tariffs on laborers brought in from Mexico.

(4) In general try to think like Nature. Nature loves negative feedback and decentralized operation. In shaping an economy, encourage closed loops and discourage loopless control. Encourage direct ownership of companies, discourage shareholder ownership. Follow Henry Ford, "Pay workers enough to buy what they make." Discourage outsourcing of labor and capital. Encourage smaller units with minimal coupling. Discourage giant corporations and giant governments.

= = = = =

There's no such thing as matter, no such thing as particles. It's all energy and waves. It's all work, and we should value it accordingly. Furniture consists of the photosynthetic labor of trees, improved by the intelligent labor of humans; and furniture serves us with its own labor by giving us rest or helping us to cook. We should value it highly. Stocks and derivatives and "swaps" are pure numbers. We should consider them worthless and counterfeit, and punish anyone who attempts to use them.

= = = = =

Followup entry here.

Labels: Blinded by Stats, Carbon Cult, Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 5:05 AM

  Baselines
Civilization requires a firm baseline of economics and culture and basic security. Under the tender guidance of Alinsky and Soros we have smashed all baselines. You can't count on banks to finance your business, you can't count on churches to help with morality, you can't count on science to provide logic or common sense, you can't count on police to keep your neighborhood secure. All of these institutions are either owned by the Tribe or deathly afraid of the Tribe. The Tribe keeps everything bubbling and roaring in all directions at once, so that only Tribal members can lock into the wildly thrashing baseline.

Measurements and senses always start from a baseline. Our senses naturally treat ambient as baseline, PROVIDED the ambient changes slowly enough. When ambient changes too fast we lose our bearings. We may seize or hallucinate or pass out.

Language also requires a baseline, which isn't necessarily a constant as measured by non-linguistic instruments. A clock doesn't treat the moving present as a constant, but languages do. A yardstick doesn't assume MY current position in space as zero, but languages do.

Languages assume the moving present as the baseline for verb tenses, take MY current location as baseline for noun cases, and assume certainty as the baseline for subjunctivity.

Languages can build on these baselines in many directions.

English goes for multilayered time baselines. We can express past from future, future from past, future from past seen from future, etc. Many 'primitive' languages pay little attention to time but have multilayered baselines for probability, certainty, or hearsay-ness.

No language has ever tried to keep up with a Sorosian bucking bronco baseline of constantly twisting and reversing factuality and probability.

Newspeak worked around the issue by skipping tense and probability. All action is current and definite, with no way to express or imagine past or future or guessing. Whatever the Party declares to be true is absolutely true as of this microsecond. When you speak you are speaking the Party. You are physically unable to do anything else.


SOROS DELENDA EST.

Labels: Grand Blueprint, Metrology, Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 12:01 PM

  Defunging
Vaguely outlining the first stage of an idea, tied closely to earlier thoughts on economics as a verb.

Caveat: The goal is important, but the method I'm suggesting here is non-functional. It clearly won't work. Maybe it will trigger a better idea by a better thinker.

Goal: Seems like there should be a way to re-establish real value without going all the way back to barter. A way to have a portable currency that tells you something about the source of its value. Most big stores won't care, but for those who do care, this currency would allow you to trace how it was generated. This will eliminate fungibility. It will give more discriminative power to merchants, who can encourage specific types of work by pricing things differently. (eg Your money comes from speculation? You pay double.)

Method: First step is to take 'fractional reserve' away from banks. Loans are a destroyer of value, NOT a source of value, so new currency shouldn't be created by loans. Value is created by LABOR and INVESTMENT IN PRODUCTIVE FACILITIES, regardless of whether the investment came from borrowing or saving. And it's better all the way around when everything comes from saving.

So: new value should be created each time someone is paid for LABOR. When the automaker pays an assembly-line worker for a week of wrench-turning, or when you pay the dog groomer for an hour of careful nail-cutting and hair-trimming. New value.

New-value payment should be in the form of a physical thing with built-in data. Smart card or similar. You can then use the smart card directly to pay for your gas and hamburgers, or you can pour its value into your account where it MAINTAINS ITS SOURCE INFO. Your account will then mostly contain value that you created yourself by working, plus a mix of other things like tax refunds and inheritance. Because the tax refund came back from money you created, the gov't would have to preserve your labor-signature on the refund check.

Here's where the idea blows up: When I pay you for fixing my roof, I'm paying with value that I've already generated. How would this system recognize that I'm creating or crediting new value by paying you, while simultaneously decreasing or debiting my own stored labor-value? If my account doesn't decrease by the amount I pay you, I've got a bottomless cup. I don't have an answer for this question yet.

= = = = =

Later thought: The first part of the goal, snatching currency creation from the banks and handing it to the real creators, is dead easy. The mechanism already exists in many countries and has a painfully obvious name. Value-Added Tax. Whether you actually impose the tax or not, use the basis numbers for VAT to control the money supply, and take banks and the Fed out of the loop. As for the second part, preferential rewards for real creators, how about imposing the VAT backwards? If you are generating value by labor or retail sales, you don't pay the VAT. If you are destroying value by speculating or lending, you pay the VAT for everyone else.

= = = = =

Another sidenote: This short feature on the history of the 2-dollar bill mentions that for many years the Two did tell you something about the source of its value. Racetracks and whores used Twos almost exclusively. When you spent a Two, it told the recipient how you spent your time.

Labels: Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 12:44 PM

  What is fraud?
Random and stupid thoughts.

The financial twits are full of the latest "whistleblowing", exposing bad accounting practices at GE and Disney.

Is this fraud? Not really. It doesn't steal money from anyone. It might give a wrong impression to big investors, but big investors can afford to form their own impressions using objective data. If hedge funds aren't doing their own checking before spending a few billion, too fucking bad.

How about Tesla? When Elon promises full autonomy but can't possibly deliver because full autonomy is physically impossible, is that fraud? Not really. The cultists are happy to spend the extra money because they're not really buying a car. They're buying Gaian indulgences with wheels. Spending more for an indulgence buys more glory and salvation. The real harm is the partial autonomy itself, because it deprives drivers of skill. If the cultists were paying for FSD and receiving nothing, they'd be better off.

Let's take it down to a much lower level. Last year I had a contractor build a sidewalk from the porch to the street, partly because I'm getting too old to shovel snow off grass, and partly for a pointless and misplaced sense of neighborhood pride. I ordered the sidewalk plus porch repair, but the contractor never did the porch repair. Is that fraud? Not really. It's just an overpriced sidewalk. I still got the easier shoveling and the pride.

The only case where you can unambiguously define fraud is payment in advance for work not done. Most such cases are small and not worth the trouble of prosecuting. Some are understood to be charity, not purchase.

What's worth prosecuting? Paying for benefit and receiving actual harm.

I mentioned two "frauds" yesterday in the context of early radio: JB Brinkley's goat glands and Aimee MacPherson's religious cult. Aimee was performing a positive service for her customers. Prayer gives confidence, and prayer accompanied by a talisman is even better. Confidence is a great healer. Brinkley was giving confidence, but he was also doing real harm. Surgery is always harmful, and only worth doing when the benefits are likely to be much greater than the harm. His surgery was sloppy and inexpert.

= = = = =

Later note: I wasn't really trying to fit this into a subject, just rambling... but it does fit the theme of economics as a verb.

Labels: skill-estate

  ¶ 7:33 AM

  Language update for October



Professor Polistra has shoveled out another load of verbal shit: new terms and misused words.

= = = = =

Underrepresented.

A long euphemism for poor. "The recyclers in Buenos Aires mainly live in shanty towns. They are the most underrepresented people in the city."

= = = = =

The Disenfranchised.

A longer euphemism for poor. "The people here are the disenfranchised. They don't have the means to travel to New York for the protest."

= = = = =

Insufficiently Provisioned.

The longest euphemism for poor! Used by Professor Phil Scraton in discussing the Traveller criminals.

= = = = =

Space used metaphorically:

"Steve Jobs took all of those music companies who were afraid of the digital space, and gave them..."

"In the cosmetic space, perfumes are hot. In the Internet space, iPhones are hot...."

"Ellen Zentner, working more in the fixed-income space of economics..."

= = = = =

Sketchy.

Seems to mean incomplete or rough or a lot of other things. At the moment it's a fresh visual metaphor. Will undoubtedly become trite later on.

"If you don't have government-provided day care and you're forced to rely on private care that is sketchy..."

Ski resort advertises "More time on the mountain, less time on sketchy mountain roads."

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Confronting as adjective.

"I used various views which are confronting in various ways." Seems to be a variant on transgressive, used solely by avant-garde "artist" types. Means that the "artist" has enforced rigid unyielding Establishment orthodoxy in the most violent and inquisitorial way, while pretending to be a Rebel Outsider. (Dammit, at least the original Inquisitors were honest about their intentions.)

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Define as middle-voice verb.

"We've heard from Miranda, who is disenchanted with the church and defines as Queer." Seems to be a variant on identifies.

Labels: Language update

  ¶ 4:12 PM

  Language update (special Thanksgiving edition)


Professor Polistra is thankful for a new (small) load of misused or strange words. She leads off with one that came in a uniquely appropriate story today:

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Raucous as noun:

Neighbors were forced to call police early Thursday after hearing a raucous out in the street. When they looked outside, it turned out to be a group of squabbling turkeys! Police responded to the scene near 18th and Rockwood to check on the turkeys. They appeared to have settled the squabble and wandered off on their way.

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Longer-stay:

Euphemism for "meth motel".

Officers say the fight broke out at the longer-stay hotel in the 12000 block of E. Sprague. Police are still looking for the suspect.

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Progress as verb:

We acknowledge the appointment of Dame Janet Smith to lead the BBC commissioned review into this matter and recognise her need to progress this important work.

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Defribillator:

BBC's version of the word. Most Americans pronounce it defibulator.

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Doinwell:

New universal meaningless response to the universal meaningless question Howareyou.

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Antithical:

New Wash gov Inslee says he'll move quickly to implement the referendum that legalizes pot: "I don't think there's any reason that that's antithical to national security or interstate commerce."

Not an accidental omission, because he puts the accent on the second syllable. Clearly this is his version of the word.

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Undiscover:

A neat story. Oceanographers working near Australia realized that a substantial island, present on all navigational charts for a long time, simply isn't there. Never was there. The seafloor is uniformly deep in that area, with no indication of any protrusions or outcroppings. So 'Sandy Island' has now been officially undiscovered.


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Professor Polistra hopes to see lots more undiscoveries in years to come. If science wants to regain sanity and respect, it will have to undiscover a huge pile of alleged "things" and "facts" that have been on the charts for a long time. "Global warming", biodiversity, quantum physics, evolution by mutation, most current ideas in economics and psychology.

Labels: Language update

  ¶ 12:08 PM

  All sparky on the western front
This article argues against the usual water analogy in teaching electronics. The author wants us to use some modern nonsense instead. The basic problem is that the author doesn't understand how the water analogy is used!

The waterfall analogy — where the height, flow rate and number of rocky obstacles in a waterfall equate to voltage, current and resistance — has no relevance beyond simple battery-based circuits.

Worse still, it — and a lot of our language around circuits — feeds into the idea that moving electrons themselves carry energy from one part of a circuit to another. It's a lie.

The truth is way more spectacular: the energy doesn't travel through the wires at all — it shoots through the space around them, at the speed of light. (Way to bury the lead, science!).

The thing is, there's a conceptual model that explains what's happening in a simple battery/bulb circuit and that works equally well for high-end AC circuits and everything in them. The same concept that actual physicists use (see below). So kids don't need to learn a DC 'waterfall' model of current that they'll have to abandon if they go on to learn about anything more advanced than a torch.

Stupid. Real electronics teachers don't use the water model exclusively; it's just an initial transfer from ordinary life to the world of fields. By the time we get to transistors and capacitors and inductors, we're using fields AND flow. Author doesn't seem to know this.

And the proposed new model has its own problems. If you're dealing solely with the fields around the conductors, how do you visualize the pinching that happens inside the conductor of a FET? I don't see the advantage.

Beyond that, the proposed 'physics model' assumes distinct positive and negative charges, which are not really there in practical circuits. The waterfall picture DOESN'T assume opposite types of charge; it works solely with a difference of potential energy between two ends of a resistor or two ends of a battery. Electrons flow 'down' from the more negatively charged end to the less negatively charged end.

[Sidenote: this two-field model closely resembles Georg Ohm's 1827 model, which was based on an analogy with heat and cold.]

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While pondering these two models of electricity, focusing tightly on pot diff, I suddenly looked 'backwards' and realized something new (to me!) about waterfalls. More broadly a new intuition about gravitational potential energy.

You don't need Niagara to observe a waterfall. Your kitchen sink will do just fine. You can FEEL and SEE F=MA with a faucet and a dish.



Even within this one-foot waterfall, you can SEE the acceleration and FEEL the force. Drops accelerate and break up from top to bottom, and you can feel more force at the bottom of the diff. If you want to rinse a dish faster, hold it lower. [Artistic note: I made the dish grow larger to symbolize the increased pressure. Poor symbol, but couldn't think of a better way to indicate it.]

Here's the new (to me!) intuition. Previously I had thought of pot energy in this context as a sort of subjective or arbitrary imposition. Because gravity is effectively the same at both heights, you're not really changing anything by moving the dish up and down. This felt completely unsatisfying.

Now I see. The mass of the earth is irrelevant. Only the potential difference matters. It's just the same as two ends of a resistor. The difference in voltage between the two ends of a resistor is set by everything in the circuit, the combination of all source pushes, reactances and resistances at this moment. It doesn't depend on some big globe-sized "universal voltage planet". No such thing. And it's the same with gravitational potential.

The giant mass of the earth is not the 'special' end of the pot diff. It's just a local lower end point, same as the positive (really less negative) pole of a battery.

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In modern electrical circuitry you can't see the pot diff, but it wasn't always that way. Lady Danbo is testing her code skills here on a Signal Corps SCR-74 transmitter, used in WW1. This was an extremely primitive gadget, basically just a Model T spark coil with a key attached. No oscillator, no tuning, no antenna impedance matching. You were putting out a signal on all frequencies at once, with antenna length somewhat restricting or preferring a broad band.



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Now let's stretch the analogy beyond its breaking point. In terms of economics as a verb, can we form an economic equivalent of pot diff? Not cleanly or objectively. You can't really map econ onto f=ma or v=ir. But the spark gap does offer a sloppy analogy. In econ, potential is blackmail force. Money that has an army of soldiers or an army of lawyers or one Sharpton or one Goldman behind it has vastly more ability to overcome the resistance of the air. Consider a medical transaction with a hospital on one side of the gap and me on the other side. As an uncool old white dude, I have less than zero force. Price comes at me rigidly, with open-circuit output impedance; no way to pull down the price. The hospital can charge me $10000000 or $10000000000000000 and I have to pay. But if I'm represented by an insurance company, my side has a high blackmail force. The insurance company can withdraw all of its patronage if the hospital doesn't charge a normal and reasonable price. Result: Spark bridges the gap. Hospital's output impedance is nearly shorted. Price pulls down to $100.

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Artistic note for Poser types: the spark-gap transmitter is now released in this set.

Labels: Danbo, Experiential education

  ¶ 2:31 AM