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I think it is really crucial to note that aminorex and I are not debating whether some are better leaders and organizers than others, but rather whether time preference can be predicted perfectly (i.e. without friction a.k.a. with a priori omniscience).
So I am not envisioning a world where every person is their own boss. No. I am envisioning a world where leaders have to weigh the cost of time into their time preference decisions.
I am talking about reality. Aminorex is talking about delusions (e.g. Communism) where something (e.g. diversity) that isn't free of cost is assumed to be free of cost.
One thing Jason Hommel taught me is you can't give away for free that which is not free.
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We have to wonder why you are so against for example a 5% per annum debasement rate, when in fact that has been the reality since Mesopotamia. Is it because you are insecure without the motivation to enslave others? But don't worry, even in the Knowledge Age there will still be a power law distribution of capital (you still have the motivation to compete to be at the top of the social totem pole), but the capital will be stored in constant knowledge generation, not in stored digits for old misers to leech and enslave the youth with. Old man (as I am too), if you can't continue producing then go silently into the night instead of stomping all over those in your wake. Your delusion of a frictionless time preference is insanity. Money that has been stored for a decade instead of being invested in creating more (knowledge) production, is no longer creating capital thus shouldn't be valued as capital.
The ability to transmit capital through time is no less important than the ability to transmit it through space. Indeed and the key word is "capital" and not money. You continue to conflate the two. I quote myself: Some will create more knowledge value than others, and thus relatively be able to trade for more knowledge.
They will use fungible money to trade with, because it is more efficient than barter. But they don't need that money to retain its undebased value for decades. They will turn that money over as fast as possible to accelerate their own knowledge production. To the extent they can't, then it is best to debase that money, because they are no longer efficient with that much monetary capital. Thus it logically follows that if we don't want monetary capital to diverge from knowledge capital, then we must debase the monetary.
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P.S. I do agree that there will still be some top-down organization, but it will become more localized (i.e. decentralized instances of localized top-down structures) and thus long-term stored money will wane.
The entire point is that money should be a fungible energy pump for moving non-fungible production through the economy. The money is constantly recycled, so that it remains congruent with the capital it represents. The more capital you can constantly create (surely your ROI can far exceed the debasement rate), the more money you can hold short-term. Thus the debasement rate is just a minimum ROI that must be attained. It is a filter on laziness or overconcentration of capital (because we know the more concentrated capital is, at some point it becomes less efficient).
Society will choose the money which accomplishes that goal. Even at 5% debasement, if you buried the money in a hole, it will still be worth 64% of its non-debased value after 8.6 years. And that doesn't even factor in all the increases in productivity due to rapid cycling (velocity) of money driven by the debasement, thus if productivity doubles in 8.6 years, you still increased your purchasing power by +29% for doing nothing other than burying your money in a hole. And if you instead put your money to work in some activity that has a ROI > 5%, then your stored money doesn't even decrease in real purchasing power, even if productivity increases are at a standstill.
The entire point is that money should be a fungible energy pump for moving non-fungible production through the economy.
An enormous part of the economy is in the future. Indeed but how far into the future? If I had the idea to create an Android app and waited 8.6 years before starting it and burying my money in the ground, by the time I started it, the market will very likely have changed and my app will no longer be needed. You are conflating unproductive consumption with productive investment. Yes it is good to delay unproductive consumption, but that doesn't mean it is good to bury capital (as money) in a hole nor to deposit your money in a bank so it can lend money for unproductive consumption. A debasement rate makes it more difficult for lending to be profitable, and acts as filter on unproductive activities. It doesn't inhibit capitalism nor prevent one from aggregating more capital if they are more productive. You arbitrarily pick 0% debasement out of a hat and declare it to be most ethical and optimum, but you have no logic which can support that arbitrary selection. Whereas, I am presenting logic for why 0% is not optimum, for it enables unproductive consumption and saving in banks. The way to squelch usury and debt as a paradigm is to decentralize the debasement with PoW so the banksters can't capture the debasement. Then they have to actually compete to make high ROI investments instead of charging their losses to the public. The money is constantly recycled, so that it remains congruent with the capital it represents.
When you create a reserve of liquidity, none of the real capital leaves the economy. All you do is make all the float more valuable. The real (social) capital remains in the network. By removing excess accumulation from one point in time and airdropping it back in at another point in time, you are able to create some serious waves, inject energy into the system, and compound value through (token) capital formation. Itś all just symbol pushing, programming. Rob me of the ability to compound entropy in this way, and you destroy uncountable degrees of freedom. I can't fathom how you can conflate so much. I thought you were a high IQ guy. Why can't you see that you are creating a strawman false dichotomy? Never did debasement take away (or even diminish) any of those things you enumerate as important, unless you conflate "capital" with "money". It was the capture of debasement by the central banks that is negative, not debasement. Debasement is positive, because frictionless systems don't exist. The more capital you can constantly create (surely your ROI can far exceed the debasement rate), the more money you can hold short-term. Thus the debasement rate is just a minimum ROI that must be attained. It is a filter on laziness or overconcentration of capital (because we know the more concentrated capital is, at some point it becomes less efficient).
Lazy people don't do capital formation. Depends what you mean by "capital". If you mean money, then hell they do! Who the fuck are the banksters. If you mean knowledge production, then correct. Any minimum ROI required to stay in the game just means I need to concentrate a larger hoard in order to transmit value into the future. You make that endeavor exponentially more difficult with a linear increase in debasement. That sucks. Very poor trade-off: Linear benefit, exponential loss.
Complete nonsense. Come on man, if you aren't even going to think, then you are just wasting my effort and time. And it shouldn't. The debased money drives the non-debased money out-of-circulation, as it should.
Only as long as the state forces them to take it. Remove coercion, and no one will accept your will-o-wisps. It's more like Gresham's dictat than law. If you remember the law, you must surely remember why it was true. Take away those conditions, and it is no longer true. Nonsense again. You need to actually understand Gresham's Law[1]. People will chose the currency which has the most trade, because they need to be able to trade their money for things they need and want. Misers can choose physical gold over dollars today, and that has nothing to do with State coercion, rather market reality. Nobody wants to trade gold coins for Starbucks. Sorry man, you are delusional. You argue with reality. No money has ever any money existed that wasn't debased. Why is that? Why didn't the population chose the non-debased gold coins? Because of the State was standing at every vendor with a gun to his head! Hell no. Delusional goldbug miser nonsense! It is precisely this goldbug delusional nonsense which retarding the adoption of cryptocurrency[1]. But don't worry, I will fix that soon! The problem with debasement in the past is it ended up in the central banks control.
Disagree: The problem with debasement is that it destroys the freedom to program. It places bounds on entropy. More delusional nonsense. Oh, and I have written 1000 lines of code in a day, on many occasions (much to the detriment of my health at the time). I've written about a dozen >>10kloc apps, and spent years working on a system over a million lines, ultimately leading the effort for a while. Which could never have been accomplished without a whole lot of capital formation.
You mean stored money capital, not knowledge capital. I programmed million user applications all by myself with no money upfront. Just me in a Nipa Hut in the Philippines with my computer and internet connection. And health willing, I will do it again soon (I am busy on it now). And finally we get to the crux of your need for stored monetary slavery. It is because you get sick when you work too much, so you want to be able to parasite on those who work too much. Learn how to have a healthy environment when you code. Exercise more. Have a nice view to relax your eyes. Get out in fresh air every day. Etc.. I am currently working on a project which requires a greater degree of capital formation than has ever been achieved in human history. If successful, it will benefit many many millions of people in the first generation, and hopefully those benefits will compound to the whole species in future generations.
How many million user programs have you written? Talk is cheap, show me the code. You attribute an erroneous value on yourself (and your fellow stored money top-down capitalists). How do you know a priori that you are more wise than the person who invested his capital immediately instead of burying it in a hole to express a time preference? You can't know. Some percent will fail. That is why assigning 0% cost to time is very costly to the economy! Duh! At the asymptote of infinite time for capital to buried in a hole, the detrimental cost rises to infinity! Even a 15 year old could probably understand that simple equation.
You want to wish away friction from the time domain, but that is insane, because it never was in reality and there is no such thing as a frictionless system. You just transfer the frictional costs else where at great detriment to the economy and society. Duh! The reason projects had to be so big and thus you need employees instead of active owners is because software production has not been remunerated in modules up to now[2]. [2] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=495527.msg9972003#msg9972003
programming machines will be obsoleted one day. machines will program the machines. we will create our competition. and we will lose that round.
Utter nonsense and propaganda. I refuted Kurzweil[3]. [3] http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html#Algorithm_!=_Entropy
That's why you should stop thinking about money as a commodity. I wasn't. It's a symbol used to program society.
Exactly.
But if their capital is knowledge, and it can't be created with money (because creativity doesn't respond to money, it responds only to the heart and desire and serendipity), then how can I induce them with money?
That's a conceivable end-state to a lengthy process. Several forks in the path are possible, and that particular end-state may be very long indeed in coming. Please remember that we are not there yet. A symbol is not knowledge, but the transition from commodity to knowledge must necessarily involve a transition from material to symbolic, if it is to be incremental. However, knowledge is not fungible. Knowledge cannot be money per se. It can conceivably supplant money, but that requires vast degrees of social reorganization and at least one generational change. (Think Arthur C. Clarke.) You want to immanentize that eschaton, and I can respect that. Given a notion of inevitability ( pace Marx) I can't fault you for trying to advance that clock. Meanwhile, there is work to be done, and God willing I am going about doing it. The transition is well underway under your radar. You shouldn't place so much value on yourself being omniscient and thus valuing your stored money at 0% friction for perpetuity. Can't you grasp that an entire generation of developing world knowledge workers has grown up without prioritizing materialism? Wait I will go find a survey on their priorities which I saw recently...(couldn't find it, but here are some I found[4]) We can argue about how long it will take for the waterfall transition to ensue, but there is no argument about it being inevitable. You go on thinking you can get maximum motivation from programmers by offering them money, while I will push on with my theory that they will be most motivated by owning their own creations and really appreciation (both in ROI and social feedback loops). |
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I can make my argument to aminorex more succinct as follows.
Money that has been stored for a decade instead of being invested in creating more (knowledge) production, is no longer creating capital thus shouldn't be (fully) valued as capital.
The entire point is that money should be a fungible energy pump for moving non-fungible production through the economy. The money is constantly recycled, so that it remains congruent with the capital it represents. The more capital you can constantly create (surely your ROI can far exceed the debasement rate), the more money you can hold short-term. Thus the debasement rate is just a minimum ROI that must be attained. It is a filter on laziness or overconcentration of capital (because we know the more concentrated capital is, at some point it becomes less efficient).
This is why all money is debased since Mesopotamia and that will never change. And it shouldn't. The debased money drives the non-debased money out-of-circulation, as it should.
The problem with debasement in the past is it ended up in the central banks control. But PoW solves that, and we need to fund PoW anyway. And tx fees are anti-scale and anti-commerce.
Really I don't know why it took you so long to realize this!
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Post-scarcity, Post-Industrial World
Aminorex, if someone handed me a $billion but I found I couldn't buy what I wanted with it, what would be the value of those $billion digits? In fact, the $billionaires can't buy what they really want. There are only so many possessions you can buy, before you've bought duplicates of everything. This is why they look for overpriced symbols of wealth to purchase so they can feel they haven't run out things to buy.
Needs and desires drive the economy.
If I don't want "one size fits all" software and manufactured items, but I rather want them highly diversified (far beyond the diversity that a factory or top-down command economy can produce), then I have no choice but to pay the producers of software and 3D printer designs in the form of money that they find most capitalistic (i.e. the one they can use to build their capital).
But if their capital is knowledge, and it can't be created with money (because creativity doesn't respond to money, it responds only to the heart and desire and serendipity), then how can I induce them with money?
Your theories derive from physical resource scarcity wherein people need significant money (i.e. 30 - 50% of their income) just to survive or for basic needs, but there is no resource scarcity. Programmers are just fine with Jolt cola, pizza, and a desk to sleep under. We are not lacking physical resources.
What motivates us is knowledge exchange and seeing our work being used and appreciated.
We only need money as a way to make our knowledge exchange more fungible. We don't need money as a long-term store of oppressive destruction of our capital by top-down outsiders who aren't contributing any capital in kind.
This is why rpietila and I no longer understand each other. We understood each other only when I was temporarily deluded as silver bug from 2007 to 2010.
I understand human nature will try to create artificial scarcity to try to have power, e.g. wars can create physical scarcity. But they never succeed long-term.
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You can't touch the anonymous programmer you resent. You can't out compete him with your money, because the programmer you hire just wants your money only. Competition doesn't exist for a programmer, because he is the only one who knows his code as well as he does. There are more opportunities for programmers than there are programmers and that will never change. Sorry your model of the Knowledge Age is uninformed, probably because you are not a programmer and you don't understand that software is not engineering (bounded entropy), rather it is an art form (unbounded entropy) and will always be[1]. I am, in fact, a programmer. (I wrote ~200 lines of C++, 75 lines of python, 50 lines of shell, and 12 lines of matlab today.) So is any CEO worth his salt. He's just programming the organization, rather than a dumb automaton. His unbounded entropic art form is essential to achieving human potential. Moreover, 90% of all humans should never write a line of code that anyone else is going to depend upon. 99% should never write a line of code that a human life may depend upon. Yet they are almost all useful for some constructive purpose, when suitably guided. Which requires capital formation. You aren't a programmer in the sense of understanding my point, until you've written an application with 10,000 lines of code. Then you start to appreciate the point that no one can compete with what you did. Programming is individuality. The capital is the formation of that individual expression, i.e. the knowledge itself not the monetary. Everyone will be trading their knowledge creations. I have no idea why you think only a few percent would. People (consumers) are diverse with diverse desires, situations, and needs. One size fits all sucks. Have you tried the one size fits all shoes lately? Some will create more knowledge value than others, and thus relatively be able to trade for more knowledge. They will use fungible money to trade with, because it is more efficient than barter. But they don't need that money to retain its undebased value for decades. They will turn that money over as fast as possible to accelerate their own knowledge production. To the extent they can't, then it is best to debase that money, because they are no longer efficient with that much monetary capital. Thus it logically follows that if we don't want monetary capital to diverge from knowledge capital, then we must debase the monetary. You apparently view the world as Cathedrals. The world is a Bazaar. Suggested reading material: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355212.msg9940008#msg9940008http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/magic-cauldron/magic-cauldron-5.htmlP.S. I do agree that there will still be some top-down organization, but it will become more localized (i.e. decentralized instances of localized top-down structures) and thus long-term stored money will wane. |
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You can't touch the anonymous programmer you resent. You can do like they did in Vietnam massacre an entire village hoping one of the many you kill is the enemy. I do expect the socialism to kill itself this way. You can't out compete him with your money, because the programmer you hire just wants your money only. Competition doesn't exist for a programmer, because he is the only one who knows his code as well as he does. There are more opportunities for programmers than there are programmers and that will never change. Sorry your model of the Knowledge Age is uninformed, because probably you are not a programmer and you (apparently) don't understand that software is not engineering (bounded entropy), rather it is an art form (unbounded entropy) and will always be[1]. Your model is also failing to understand that the programmers (hackers) don't need you. They can survive on Jolt cola and pizza and coding. The rest of the world could do what ever it wants and it doesn't matter to us. But you need us for everything. Your world doesn't survive without our code. Fact is that knowledge now makes the world go around. And knowledge is all that really matters now. Human nature will ascribe to what matters economically, always has. Just as you can't tell human nature that financing Model Ts is a productive activity because it employed more people than today's car factories. You can't stop the progression of technology, because economic paradigm shifts hand victory to all those who don't try to dig trenches with spoons. |
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And the need to organize humans on a free basis will not go away.
We fundamentally disagree then. The maximum-division-of-labor (at its asymptote) means humans don't need to be organized top-down. Top-down organization destroys knowledge production, with one silly example being that everything rpietila has invested in being destroyed: * silver * Bitcoin * Monero All collapsing or in Monero's case going no where fast. Why is Monero not going fast to change the world? Because paying people to code does not motivate them. They just do the minimum to get paid. People get motivated to change the world, when that is the reason they are doing it in the first place, not for the money. Programmers don't need much money, as I detailed in the prior post. The more they program (the more they don't leave their desk + proximate bed with pizza and Jolt cola), the less money they need, because they thus don't go outside to spend any. Knowledge does not obsolete capitalism per se. It does transform it into something unrecognizable to a 19th century robber baron. It does render wage slavery as we know it today obsolete. It may yet render the charter corporation obsolete. But it still requires capital formation.
Yeah that capital formation is the accrued knowledge capital, not money. We can use money as a language to push energy into short-term priorities, but (since top-down is not omniscient) the long-term accrual of knowledge is bottom-up, serendipitous, and can't be (perfectly a.k.a. frictionlessly) top-down organized. |
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I fear that frictions to capital formation will de-optimize
You assume a false dichotomy. The Knowledge Age is about maximizing the formation of capital in the form of accrued knowledge, not in the form of financialization or stored monetary units. Money becomes a language for trade, not for power law stored monetary suppression of maximum-division-of-labor efficiencies. Actually you ostensibly don't understand the definition of "capital" (I know you do but why the conflation?), because you conflated it with money. The money you are storing is not capital and in fact (given the $200 trillion debt bubble) is anti-capital, i.e. money and capital have diverged because of the corrupted system. The real capital is the decentralized, bottom-up knowledge that drives the economy. Top-down knowledge is an oxymoron, as I explained in my essay "Rise of Knowledge" which is linked in the OP. It was in the Industrial Age that the requisite large economies-of-scale and large upfront fixed capital investment costs, enabled monetary capital to parasite on the real capital of the economy and extract parasitic rents. We thus assume money and capital are correlated, but not so. Prof. Pettis even writes about "social capital", which is another example of stored money not being correlated to capital. http://mic.com/articles/7970/the-difference-between-money-and-capital-in-the-american-economyMuch confusion in economics results from the common practice of referring to money as capital. In fact money and capital are two different things. Capital is the real resources that producers use in order to make the goods that we all consume: things like factories, machine tools, trucks, and roads. All capital exists in a specific form. Money on the other hand is non-specific; it can be used to buy anything that is available in the marketplace, including capital goods. This is what leads to the common practice of referring to money as capital. In the Knowledge Age, the only capital for example a programmer needs is a personal computer, an internet connection, a desk next to his bed (or sleep under the desk), a six-pack of Jolt cola, gift coupons for Dominos Pizza, and most importantly knowledge of how to code (which is by far the most expensive item on this list). |
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AnonyMint seems to like demurrage because he sees the cultural damage done by power-law distribution of wealth.
It has nothing to do with culture nor ideological preferences. You have ostensibly not understood why the Knowledge Age is important. The maximum-division-of-labor is inhibited by the financialization of economies-of-scale, whereas in the Knowledge Age, the producers of knowledge can move their productions directly to the end consumer, thus the middle man of finance is cut out. The Theory of the Firm middle man is similarly cut out. It is all about advancing the rate at which prosperity accelerates. Sorry but rpietila and you still don't get it. Try to read my "Rise of Knowledge" essay linked from the OP more carefully (or perhaps you never read it?). The desirable outcome is a level playing field, in which transactions are free, nigh frictionless, and contracting is libre.
Exactly. But you can't accomplish that without funding mining. Transaction fees have scaling issues one of which is they are a friction on trade. The Knowledge Age places no value on (perpetually) stored monetary capital, thus debasement to fund mining has no such adverse cost. Debasement is only expropriating from those people who try to parasite on the Knowledge Age and moving backwards to the financialization Industrial Age. The Knowledge Age worker needs liquidity and trade, not long-termeternally stored monetary units, because his knowledge wealth is growing orders-of-magnitude faster than the debasement. Did the light bulb turn on yet? P.S. the problem of the world today is there is too much useless stored monetary capital (we created $200 trillion of global debt and gave it to ourselves and expect it to generate wealth!): http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/12/how-might-a-china-slowdown-affect-the-world/So what kind of world are we in – one with excess savings, or one with excess demand? I would be truly surprised if anyone suggested that we are in the latter world and not the former. A world of excess savings is prone to bubbles, and either debt-fueled consumption or high unemployment, and this pretty much describes the world we have been living for the past two decades.
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In the United States during much of the 19th Century, an erratic and unstable financial system combined with the huge infrastructure needs of a rapidly expanding continental economy meant that the US was almost always in short supply of money and capital*, and so to a large extent its growth rate was constrained mainly by British liquidity. When money poured into the US from Europe, and mainly from England, investments in the US grew apace and the US economy boomed, until some event caused the taps to be turned off (the collapse in silver mining in the 1820s during Latin America’s wars of independence, for example, which was followed by the US crisis of the 1830s and, as a matter of interest to those interested in Chinese history, with the replacement of silver exports with opium to the silver-starved Qing government in China). Whereas Britain may not have been an engine of growth for 18th Century India, or at least for the Indian textile industry, it was for much of the 19th Century the world’s engine of growth because it supplied much of the capital that a savings-starved world needed to fund investment.
But when savings rates are excessive, which is often a consequence of income inequality and a high state share of GDP, as I show in one of my earlier blog posts, the problem the economy faces is insufficient demand, not insufficient savings available for investment. In fact as consumption declines with the rising savings rate, it tends to reduce the need for productive investment, so that both productive investment and consumption tend to drop. |
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In what way are these mutually exclusive? Provided one does not neglect personal decentralized self-sufficiency why shouldn't a rational actor in our current environment also participate in the local collective and attempt to restrain said collective. To do otherwise is to yield the floor to those who will make decentralized self-sufficiency more difficult to achieve.
Because you will waste time and effort that could have been used to actually achieve it without being slave (dependent) on what the State does. And you will not stop the State from spiraling into the abyss, because the majority is going to demand expropriation. You can't suddenly change the situation of the majority. The majority has no other option and all the (political or even violent) fighting you do can't give them another option. The economic reality and trajectory was written into stone decades ago. It can't be altered. The economic reality is what it is. My advice to everyone is pay off all your debt because in a deflationary collapse that is underway (see oil under $50 today!) the government can take your assets and leave you with debt to pay but no assets to pay with. And debtor's prisons are returning. Even though I was reduced to near pauper, I prioritized paying off my credit card debts in 2014 and did pay $20,000 of it off for less than $10,000 by accepting best offers for negotiated settlement. I only have about $2000 of debt remaining (except that my ex took out a $25,000 student loan recently and I don't know if the USA will try to pin that on me). Also radically reduce the risk to unjust IRS audits and assessments, because these will become more common. Also radically reduce the risk to lawsuits, because these will become more common as westerners get desperate. Then the next priority is to align your vocation with the Knowledge Age and so you have income even during global economic collapse and your skills are transportable to any location you might choose to move to as the chaos takes form. Gold can become an albatross around your neck, because you can't reliably and easily move it internationally. In fact, I lost much of my wealth because I couldn't physically carry my 18,000oz with me from USA to the Philippines, and so I had to trust others and that is one facet of where the losses accrued over time. |
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I don't have time to study this in detail, and it seems to be off topic of Economics and perhaps belongs in the Technical discussion thread.
But if there is breakthrough on the dimensionality of primes, this could potentially have major implications on cracking public-key cryptography.
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Correcting false (strawman) dichotomiesCoinCube, my point from the outset of the recent discussion with you et al, was that no one can fight socialism by trying to get the entire country (nor West) to reverse course. "Slowing socialism down" is another collectivized ideal, thus antithetical to the truth. Precisely the problem with collectivism is that there can be only one direction (no degrees-of-freedom). Rather decentralized self-sufficiency actions (e.g. finding gainful vocation in the Knowledge Age in a way that prevents the State from expropriating your earnings) that better you and yours do in fact slow socialism down, but not because that collective goal was your motivation. As soon as a person bases their actions around a collective goal at nation-state scope (e.g. we must politically stop the expropriation), they are no longer prioritizing decentralized maximum-division-of-labor knowledge formation and have become a socialist. I am just telling everyone to give up on that patriotic crap, because it can't be orthogonal to collectivism. Instead view yourself as a citizen of your own sovereign world, not of a country of your compatriot slaves. Why be a slave to a country? Instead be clever about maximizing your and yours situation. The Knowledge Age will be providing that innovation in the physical economy too (e.g. no need to ship or manufacture items, just download design and print at home on 3D printer, or software for automation of physical labor with robots)! Apparently you are not understanding where the distinction is made. The antithesis of the Knowledge Age is not the physical economy, rather it is the fixed capital economies-of-scale (e.g. getting a loan to construct a factory) that enable the power law distribution of wealth to leech ( collect parasitic rents) from the productive knowledge economy. It is as you forget the main point of my "Rise of Knowledge" essay in the OP is that the Knowledge Age down values financialization and stored monetary capital, and up values individual knowledge and productivity, because knowledge isn't fungible and thus can't be financed. I think rather than focus on my statement that the value of physical commodities are declining instead focus more on the following two points. | 1. | Why USA lost its economic incentive to assimilatehttp://blog.mpettis.com/2014/12/how-might-a-china-slowdown-affect-the-world/#comment-108803... But as I have explained in my theory of a fledgling Knowledge Age, that the individual knowledge workers didn't have the economy-of-scale to produce and distribute their own knowledge works in a physical economy, and thus were enslaved by fixed capital in the Theory of the Firm and the Industrial Age. But the internet and virtual work and distribution has changed all that. Just like the Second Industrial Revolution was brought on by network effects from the First Industrial Revolution, we are now underway in the Second Computer Revolution where the network effects from the First Computer Revolution are starting to kick in and take effect. Anyone who fails to understand how this changes everything is going to have their myopic teeth kicked out by reality. | | 2. | Another two charts supporting my position of the death of stored capital and fixed capital investment Industrial Age model shows that interest rates ... have been declining inexorably since the damn of human civilization:  ... |
P.S. Gold will give you nothing but headaches. You've been warned. I was warning years 4 ago. End Game, Gold Investors Will be Destroyedhttp://www.marketoracle.co.uk/UserInfo-Shelby_H_Moore.html15 Jun 2010 - End Game, Gold Investors Will be Destroyed (44210 Reads)
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26 Oct 2010 - Silver will bottom at $22, then $45 by March 2011, then crash to $25 (24305 Reads)
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04 Mar 2013 - Reasons to Sell Gold and Silver Now (4722 Reads)
29 Mar 2013 - Bitcoin: The Digital Kill Switch (15616 Reads) When I wrote that essay, I hadn't yet figured out that my logic was actually deflationary collapse, not hyper-inflation. I was using the word "hyper-inflation", but my description was logically deflationary collapse. Even if you go back to my 2006 email with Jim Willie, my analysis was pointing to deflationary collapse, but I wasn't articulating that because my mind had been polluted by the delusional gold-bug community. As you can see above, it wasn't until March 2013 that I started to reconcile my logic and my public position on gold. Note I had been chronically ill for much of 2011 and 2012, which is why the long hiatus between forming logic in 2010 and not reconciling until 2013. And that long delay (and inaction, as well as very poor decisions and thinking when I was so ill) cost me most of my stored wealth. I went from once owning 18,000 troy ounces of silver to a pauper today.
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For more drama, I will dedicate one of my favorite songs of all time to this. The Smiths - It's Over. Or the live version. For those who are young enough and into hands-on people work than lonely programming, I suggest starting a discreet international security services firm. Communities and even individuals will need to hire private security and install security technology to deal with what is coming[1]. I hope we Anglo-Saxons (westerners) can regain ourselves and families and rid ourselves of the malaise of the trap socialism and feminism. ...
iamback
Fair enough if you do not wish to further discuss my views.
Best of luck to you brother.
Thank you so much for your kind words. Same to you brother. Wonderful to see us appreciate each other. |
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Now you understand why CoinCube took the thread so seriously. He is genuinely concerned. But I think some parts of the USA may break off from the rest and do well. Perhaps the Idaho and East WA area, to merge with Canada and Vancouver. Or just migrate to Canada, their prospects look much better given the better demographics. The socialism is mostly in the big cities. Luckily Canada has a high proportionality of Asian wealth and knowledge capital pouring in. Americans are lucky, because obtaining Canada citizenship isn't so difficult (at least if you act now). But I don't suggest any rash actions. Be methodical. It will take some years for this to play out. You have some time to think clearly first. I am not even sure if I would move if was in the USA, I might try to hold fort some where and find a non-socialist community or just ride the socialism and hide my assets and knowledge. But I already bugged out of the USA years ago. Whereas, Europeans are pretty much isolated — no country along their land borders with good demographic prospects. Perhaps Greece will break away from the Euro, then that would be the place for Libertarian Europeans to immigrate to. Some from Spain and Portugal escaped to former colonies, but unfortunately the situation of Latin America doesn't look favorable in the Knowledge Age due to the rampant socialism in their culture. Latin America appears to me to be headed into the socialism abyss along with the West, not coming out of totalitarianism and cronyism as China and India are. There might be exceptions such as Guatemala, although for example Panama appears to be going the wrong direction. Europeans could consider migrating to Russia, because I think freedom will break out in Russia just as in China. I think Russia is coming out of Communism and Putin is just a temporary blip. But culturally Russia probably has a long way to go as compared to China which is on an accelerated pathway towards capitalism and free markets. Armstrong said he was going to put out a report on the best countries for riding out this crisis. But he hasn't updated the status of that plan for the past few months. I will email him and ask for an update. Armstrong had mentioned Florida (and I believe Texas) for their special treatment of bankruptcy and real estate exclusion. Rural Texans are very self-sufficient. I haven't looked to see what % of the Texas population is rural. But I see a lot of welfare and socialism in Texas cities. I've done my research on countries, but I am not going to share it, because it is specialized to my situation which is somewhat unique. We may have war first between Russia and NATO, and China and Japan, as proxy wars of the USA. So it is not entirely clear to me that migrating to Russia or SE Asia now is the wise move. We live in interesting and tumultuous times — a Chinese curse proverb. |
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I will just respond to the parts I didn't already address or refute upthread... I have not been to India nor Pakistan, but everything credible I read is that their young geniuses (the "Knowledge Age" vanguard to vanquish America I presume) in the ghettos are "not ready for prime time" in the sense of being able to make any more than marginal changes to the world. I have been to China, Brazil and South Africa, their young geniuses will not make much difference either.
Are you ready for a reality check! India just did a Mars mission that only cost $87 million, because they know how to leverage their relative strengths. That is a sign of the Knowledge Age in action already! In spades! So please all those who tell me it will not happen quickly. It is already happening. As an analogy to billions of medium talent worker ants of Asia, Manny Pacquiao wins not by the power of his single punch, but by attrition of the accumulation of his rapid fire almost machine gun like punches. When he beats the 46-0 undefeated Floyd Gayweather this May 2nd, that will be another sign of Asia's coming dominance. Yeah Tyson could hit much harder, but he couldn't punch non-stop as Pacman can. A human can actually be killed by ants. And for his recent fights Pacman has fought in Macau (instead of the USA) where the taxes are much lower! He will come back to fight in the USA this May 2 to make Floyd STFU, then anybody who wants to fight him will have to come to Macau. The shift is underway already folks. People want to move to the USA. Yes, sure, some Indians and Chinese go back. Why not? Seek their fortune "back home" once they have earned their grubstake here. That's called freedom! A big reason many stay here.
No it is called socialism and free handouts and yes people love to immigrate to get it, and socialism is what destroyed Rome and every empire. USA is being leeched out of existence. Peru is not the only place with physical and cultural constraints to an imminent "Knowledge Age". Peru has the ANDES making transport much more difficult.
Apparently you misunderstood and inverted the logic of my upthread point. The geographical barriers are not a constraint to the Knowledge Age, which is why the USA loses its favorable economic position which fostered the assimilation during the Industrial Age. Places like India & Pakistan treat their women like second-class citizens.
Women are not statistically in the S.T.E.M. fields and thus actually a disruptive frictional drag on the Knowledge Age. Individual women may excel, but that is orthogonal to the point. I support a woman's desire to excel in S.T.E.M. fields if she wants to, but not with government mandating special treatment for women, because this just destroys the women! Feminism is another reason the West can't compete with Asia. You are apparently a prime example of the malaise. RUSSIA is always on the verge of banning Bitcoin, sound like a winner to any of you? China has recently banned GOOGLE services, ah, is that what #Winners do?
I explained upthread that the people of China are ignoring the government and the Communist Party will melt away as the Knowledge Age takes over. The salient point is one of trajectory with the West is headed deeper into totalitarianism and the East is headed out of it. The Knowledge Age will be held back in countries run by corrupt crony mafias...
The Knowledge Age is routing right around it. Do you know how many Android smartphones there are in China, Russia, Irag, etc!! Do you not understand that is the Knowledge Age underway. I am not going to argue with you back and forth. If you still can't grasp your myopia, then I will just ignore you. Because I have important work to do in the Knowledge Age, not trying to get people who can't be in it because they are too ignorant. I do respect Dr. Jim Willie, he has great insights and apparently great contacts
You are delusional. I can't really help people who like to delude themselves and aren't scholarly enough to do good study and research. I went and looked at the latest several articles of Martin Armstrong, whom I had run into before he was sprung from prison. I am withholding judgement on his general thesis (theses) as they are not easy to digest in a couple of sittings (like FOFOA is not easy).
Read the entire Mad Max thread. I already distilled Armstrong there. FOFOA is another idiot who banned me from his blog when I refuted him. I noticed nothing obvious from Armstrong about the "Knowledge Age", but perhaps contagion is arguing Knowledge Age from other bloggers (I just do not recall).
Because I am the canonical source. I invented the term. America is splintered, we no longer have the "Melting Pot" style of thinking. We are very diverse. Yet China, Russia and India are very splintered as well You have selective reading comprehension. You completely ignored that I also wrote they don't have government as 50 - 75% of GDP (instead more in the 15 - 25% range) with $100 trillion of constituent liabilities. They are coming out of socialism abyss all fresh and renewed, the West is going into the totalitarian socialism abyss all decadent and rotting. The West will expropriate its own high tech sector and destroy it, because it must go get the money where the money is, because it has to meet its obligations. France is proposing a tax on the internet. Obama is proposing 16% tax and illegal executive order on the FCC to regulate and tax the internet as a public utility. The West is heading into Fascism. Keep diversified, and keep your gold
It can't help you. Does that mean I am saying, "Don't learn programming or the nuts & bolts of Bitcoin or other technology"? Not at all. Those are skills of the future (probably), and will likely lead to a good living.
Correct. But, will the Age of Knowledge fix those potholes in Cleveland and Calcutta in the foreseeable future?
Nope.
Irrelevant. |
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I think you've misconstrued my perspective into meaning something that it's not intended to.
I am frustrated by pronouncements without any data or solid hypothesis presented. Now you make some reasoned arguments below which we can try to discuss objectively. Apologies btw for the tone of my prior message. I am a bit stressed about needing to do so much writing, when all I want to be doing is programming. So please let us try to make this discussion efficient and finish it once and for all. I agree, the USA will fracture. It's primed and ready to happen; however, what it fractures into is where I hold my hopes. This country was born from fractures, and I believe that it can be reformed from fractures. When I said "the US would have favorable conditions for recovery" that was taking a huge leap and making an assumption that the people can successfully take back this country for themselves...
I am arguing that point that the economics of the favorable geography (and most fertile farmland in the world) and the Industrial Age paradigm is what caused assimilation, and I am arguing that is going away and thus assimilation will end. You can see Europe does not economically naturally assimilate and the Euro was a failed attempt to force assimilation. Yet when Europeans came to the USA, they assimilated. Why? Because there was an economic incentive as I explained upthread. My theory isn't necessarily proven. It seems reasonable, but it needs more support with more data and organized research. I am confident it is the correct theory. I have a good record of being an accurate reductionist who consistently distills to the correct generative essence (and otherwise recognizes when his understanding is still insufficient and inconclusive). The damage caused by Katrina is not directly comparable to the damage that will be caused by economic devastation; neither in lost infrastructure, nor in the manner of public perception. While the government was successful with gun confiscation in New Orleans during Katrina, the majority of the people whose guns were confiscated were of an older generation who believed that they would have those guns returned by court order (which has already happened.) Since most of the residents had fled prior to the storm hitting, there was only a fraction of the population remaining making the job of confiscation much easier.
You are not arguing the government won't attempt to, so I don't need to cite abundant evidence that the government is potentially scheming to do so. Rather you are arguing that the conditions will not be sufficient for the government to succeed in enforcing it's Max Weber monopoly on force which is its raison d'être, at least not beyond some limits of consent from the constituents. You might for example cite the recent Bundy Ranch, Clark County, Nevada standoff, while I could retort with the Waco massacre and many others like it. Btw, I visited in July 2006 with my childhood friend Will Weber's father in my Grandad's block in Metairie, LA, and he said they never fled and were never visited by the authorities to take their guns. So I am not confident that Katrina is an entirely representative case. We can also add the 2010 BP oil spill event, where the authorities enabled a corporation to impose martial law control of a portion of south Louisiana. But here is the salient point. The majority or significant minority of Americans are directly dependent on the State economically (e.g. 57 million were on food stamps during 2008 aftermath, 102 million jobless and potentially on unemployment welfare, millions more seniors dependent on welfare and pensions which Obama will nationalize, etc), and even most of the rest are not sufficiently wealthy and thus are dependent on the economy in which the government is 50 - 75% of GDP. So the point is that the constituents are going to be in support of socialism, and go along with snuffing out any libertarian militias that want to restore small government. America will fracture precisely because there are different classes of folks and the successful class doesn't want to be bankrupted by the unproductive class. Yet the unproductive and dependent class is the majority, so therein lies the problem that will lead to massively tumultuous and probably violent outcome. There is not going to be some harmonious assimilation. You are in dream, LaLaLa land. Maybe my opinion is skewed because of my age, or my upbringing, or the people I associate with, but my personal experiences with many of the people I've spoken with in my own community has lead me to believe that a gross majority still hold on to those core values which are contrary to this "new direction."
They can talk big until they don't have any food to feed their elderly parents. The people always side with whom butters their bread. Most people don't realize they are economically dependent, until the shit hits the fan. ETA 2016 - 2020. I think the degree of totalitarian extent that the Fed is willing to go to is fairly obvious from the preparations they've made, however I'm not sure they can pull it off without a public reaction.
The public supports the government. The government provides for them. The government is 50 - 75% of GDP. What fantasy world do you live in? What data? Even under martial law the police officers want to return home to their families safely.
And they want their families to have food on the table too. Most people in the USA are dependent. If we take away the governments ability to expropriate everything as they will soon be forced to do by the coming contagion collapse, then so many people won't have their basic needs take care of. Those most people will support the expropriation. They already do! We don't live in a nation of self-sufficient constituents any more. Reality check! One of my customers is an officer with my local PD; I've spoken with him at great length about how the local PD might react under different scenarios such as martial law, economic collapse, and of a situation involving a revolution. What I learned was that the general opinion coming from the majority of the officers (the way they talk about it among themselves) was to follow the Constitution and side with the community before anything else, even if that meant supporting a revolution. I just don't know how the Fed can accomplish what it wants from a logistics standpoint when the personnel losses (those who simply won't be compelled to follow certain orders) will compound with every community...
I spoke with a former Sergeant in Corpus Christi in 2006 and he told me that all police around the country had been deputized by the Feds and could be called up by the Feds (which has become the Homeland Screwurity Dept). Those police officers who don't follow orders will lose their job or worse. It won't take too many examples before the rest get the clue that if they want to feed their families, they need to follow orders. Besides most the population will be demanding that the police officers enforce the law. The police are already expropriating the resources of the country with the Civil Asset Forfeiture fraud which is spreading. Are you not aware of this new corruption which is spreading like wildfire across police departments. - The Civil Asset Forfeiture scam[1].
I make a lot of footnote citations, because many of you readers are (understandably) ignorant and need to catch up on your research reading.
If UN soldiers did come into the US and act as a militarized police force, the heads of government who support this may as well just hang themselves.
Nice dream. Now come back to reality. The people will love to participate in a greater global society that takes care of them. They love socialism and government. Can't you see the $200 trillion debt bubble and the huge welfare states? Do you think that happened because people hate welfare and being taken care of by Big Brother? The idea was tossed around, and it was a complete political disaster. They've ruined that card, they can just tear it from the NWO play book now. The outcry was so fierce in opposition that we had political "higher ups" like the governor of Texas, talking about supporting and encouraging people to shoot them on sight. He was joined by several others who would oppose any foreign military occupation within the US. I remember seeing bumper stickers printed with a blue UN helmet in the center of a bulls eye floating around for a while.
People who can't eat are much more compliant. TPTB know they need a big crisis to move everything forward. Perhaps the worst in history ETA 2016 - 2020. I think you grossly underestimated the actual number of gun owners in America. "The long-running General Social Survey, maintained at the University of Chicago, has been asking about gun ownership since its inception in the 1970s. It has found that the number of people who say they have a gun in their home is at an all time low – hovering around 30 percent, from a high of 50 percent in the 1970s." This statistic isn't at all surprising and is certainly very low because gun owners are wising up to the reality that they need to keep their gun ownership to themselves. I will never answer yes to that question on a government form and neither would people who are living in areas where gun restrictions are getting tighter. Gun culture is generally well educated (gun culture is descriptive of the group who passes on proper respect for guns as part of upbringing.) One of the pieces of knowledge that has been passed to me was "never, ever register a gun." This is common knowledge. It's estimated that the actual rate of gun ownership in America ranges from between 39% and 59% of the population...
My ex has two guns in the house but isn't about to fight to stop the welfare she is getting from government. You can't equate that with people who are true Libertarians, which is much smaller percent less than 15%. And the "you can take it from my cold, dead hand" is only about 3 million. Mexico claiming US territory is a joke, people associate Mexican military with Mexican drug cartels; and for good reason. To think that an armed Mexican force would be able to fend off that much resistance is just too much...
You are completely missing the point. The USA will fracture from within. The productive folks will try to break away to escape be expropriated of all their wealth by the hoards of socialist, communist Hispanics and Blacks and white trash already inside the country. there are simply too many pieces that will be falling randomly.
The data says it won't be random. The outcome is already written in stone by the economics realities and stratification of the USA into classes and the loss of the Industrial and Agricultural Ages. Stick a fork in 'er. She is done. After a massive implosion, by 2033, the Generation Y will ascribe to a New World Order to bring unifying socialism to all the fractured elements that have resulted from the implosion. You're correct that I have an emotional investment in America; but it's not this country that I'm emotionally invested in, rather this ideology. I still believe that people can find it within themselves not to give up on a dream that they have held onto for so many generations; one that we've gone astray from.
You are wasting valuable energy and time fighting a tectonic force of change. Much better to flow with the change and find your new place in the new reality. ...but there's a part of me that feels like waiting for the knowledge age to save us from tyranny will surely result in megadeath just as with every other failing tyrannical regime for any other reason.
The Knowledge Age won't save anybody. The Knowledge Age is people saving themselves. It isn't a collectivized result. It can coexist with megadeath and probably will.[/list] |
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