Saturday, September 17, 2011
If you had an efficacious treatment for cancer, it worked every time it was tried, you could go to cancer wards and clean them out of sick people, what would you do? Try to get the institutional approvals from the Cancer Industry or just start curing people and hoping the world would catch on. If you had a cure for cancer, would you survive a week before being incarcerated or assassinated? Sometimes my conspiracy itch manifests.
The new economy is generating a new economic model that businesses, especially banks, are having a difficult time functioning under. The old model, Industrial Age, had assets as physical building, equipment, etc. The new model has different assets. The new asset is becoming the worker/person that has skills beyond reproduction. And, the primary differentiater is gifting or knowledge. This makes for an extremely good time to be a Christian who believes in the gifts!
Reflection of Bob Larimer: so many detailed articles about the 9/11 commemorations without once mentioning the words, Muslim, Jihad or Islam.
A visitor from another planet could have read them and assumed that the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and Flight 93 all suffered some form of spontaneous self-destruction.
Fascinating.
Prissy, appeasing, politically correct, liberal, secular progressive ideology can make for very careful censorship.
A visitor from another planet could have read them and assumed that the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and Flight 93 all suffered some form of spontaneous self-destruction.
Fascinating.
Prissy, appeasing, politically correct, liberal, secular progressive ideology can make for very careful censorship.
The war on the young is led “by cadres of elderly men, content to manage decline” and exacerbated by younger generations, who don’t seem to know what’s going on or understand the gravity of the financial situation that will hit them in the future. Luke Johnson, writing in the FT, describes the Itali...
Friday, September 16, 2011
How to cure unemployment in one fell swoop - if we had the courage
I’m about to perform a healing. For those non-believers out there… like magic, it will terrify and then delight you. Maybe it’ll scare the jesus into you.
I warn even the staunchest Christian; this will test your mettle. It will clench your teeth and stiffen your spine. But, Tea Party babies, I love you! Have faith! This idea will end unemployment, and the Fed will never be allowed to print money again. In God We Trust.
And God wants us to provide every unemployed American citizen a Guaranteed Income of $36,000 per year.
Fifteen million Americans are unemployed. Even if this program INCREASES the number of people calling themselves unemployed, I want to guarantee all of them, as long as they choose to stay in the program, a check from the Government for $692 per week.
But, there’s a catch. God’s in the details…
Instead of 99 weeks, Unemployment Insurance will end at three months. After it runs out, the unemployed will be allowed to enter our new Guaranteed Income system:
1. There’s no more minimum wage.
2. They have to take any job offered no matter what it is. ANY JOB.
3. If they slack off at work and they keep getting fired (5X and out), they are out of the program back on the street no appeal.
4. Payments decrease to zero as they earn towards $15 per hour– but on a schedule that still creates an incentive to earn more.
Once someone is in the Guaranteed Income program, their resume goes into the G/I website, and if someone offers them $2 per hour to pick up dog poop in your yard, they pick up dog poop. If a call center offers them $3 per hour for forty hours, they earn an extra $120 per week.
Poof! There’s no more unemployment.
When there’s no lower limit on what an idle worker can be paid, every available hand will be viewed by every other person in society as a cheap way to get some extra work done. We’ll go looking for layabouts. And the market will figure itself out. The streets will be clean, the grass mown, the streets swept. Children will be taken care of. Cars washed.
Imagine the millions of low cost economies that are now possible.
My favorite example is childcare. Under the new model, a hypothetical entrepreneur starts a large scale low cost DayCare center for kids. She combs through GI database looking for loving stay-at-home mommies who joined the Guaranteed Income program for the extra cash, and offers them $3 per hour, minus $1 per hour for each child they bring to work with them.
Now a mommy at work with her two kids is receiving $692 from the government and $40 from her employer every week, and she’s working full time.
The entrepreneur can now offer families DayCare that costs half of what it costs today.
This means it is less expensive to get your house cleaned, your yard picked up, and your clothes laundered. Low cost labor frees all of us to be more productive.
Tea partiers, I KNOW this is hard, but we OWE IT to fellow citizens to put an end to idleness once and for all. This is the Christian solution.
When our government created the Minimum Wage, we created a massive class of unemployable workers. The fact is many millions of people are not worth $7.25 per hour. This means that no matter how crafty the entrepreneur, he will not be able to make a profit off their labor; and if profit is impossible from their labor, the unskilled will be idle.
Progressives and evil economists like to talk about “excess capacity” and “aggregate demand”, but when we didn’t have Minimum Wage, we never had excess capacity… everyone worked, or they starved.
The Protestant work ethic all but implies that idleness is immoral. A Guaranteed Income system makes idleness almost IMPOSSIBLE. What’s more, a Guaranteed Income system allows ALL of us to be more productive because we pay less for the jobs we normally do ourselves.
Now watch this miracle. Currently our Federal Reserve is tasked with fighting inflation and unemployment. So when we have 9.5% unemployment, the Fed is legally justified in printing money. Right now we are dealing with another $600 BILLION in Quantitative Easing. Gas prices are up. Food prices are up.
But, with Guaranteed Income, we have no unemployment, so the Fed has one rule: don’t print money. This means our future prices grow much more slowly.
The costs are negligible.
Assuming this program is wildly popular and another 5 MILLION people claim to be unemployed, then we will have 20 MILLION in our Guaranteed Income system. The cost? $208 BILLION.
It is only $58 BILLION more than we spend on Unemployment Insurance ($150BILLION). This is less than a tenth of Medicare, Social Security, or Defense. $58 BILLION is less than five percent (5%) of Obama’s stimulus during the toughest of times.
And this assumes all 20MILLION are working for $3 per hour. If they make more than $3 per hour, the government pays less than $58BILLION.
What is it worth in tax revenue to put 20 Million idle bodies to work?
What is it worth to your savings to have 2% less inflation per year over the next ten years?
What is it worth to get low cost services and be more productive with your own time?
What is it worth to never hear the word “stimulus” again?
It is worth $58 BILLION? We are not heartless.
Tea Party babies! I know there are some of you that will gruffly say, “NO!” You will insist we should not even have a Minimum Wage. And you are right. But we cannot let perfect be the enemy of the good. When Tea Party politicians call for Guaranteed Income to replace Minimum Wage and Unemployment Insurance, progressives will be smote; they will be forced to argue nakedly for laziness.
This is a winning political issue. This is the loaves and fishes. It will give and give and give.
Minimum Wage truly is the “Devil’s tool.” They say God works in mysterious ways. Guaranteed Income works in an obvious way: it ensures there are no idle hands.
I warn even the staunchest Christian; this will test your mettle. It will clench your teeth and stiffen your spine. But, Tea Party babies, I love you! Have faith! This idea will end unemployment, and the Fed will never be allowed to print money again. In God We Trust.
And God wants us to provide every unemployed American citizen a Guaranteed Income of $36,000 per year.
Fifteen million Americans are unemployed. Even if this program INCREASES the number of people calling themselves unemployed, I want to guarantee all of them, as long as they choose to stay in the program, a check from the Government for $692 per week.
But, there’s a catch. God’s in the details…
Instead of 99 weeks, Unemployment Insurance will end at three months. After it runs out, the unemployed will be allowed to enter our new Guaranteed Income system:
1. There’s no more minimum wage.
2. They have to take any job offered no matter what it is. ANY JOB.
3. If they slack off at work and they keep getting fired (5X and out), they are out of the program back on the street no appeal.
4. Payments decrease to zero as they earn towards $15 per hour– but on a schedule that still creates an incentive to earn more.
Once someone is in the Guaranteed Income program, their resume goes into the G/I website, and if someone offers them $2 per hour to pick up dog poop in your yard, they pick up dog poop. If a call center offers them $3 per hour for forty hours, they earn an extra $120 per week.
Poof! There’s no more unemployment.
When there’s no lower limit on what an idle worker can be paid, every available hand will be viewed by every other person in society as a cheap way to get some extra work done. We’ll go looking for layabouts. And the market will figure itself out. The streets will be clean, the grass mown, the streets swept. Children will be taken care of. Cars washed.
Imagine the millions of low cost economies that are now possible.
My favorite example is childcare. Under the new model, a hypothetical entrepreneur starts a large scale low cost DayCare center for kids. She combs through GI database looking for loving stay-at-home mommies who joined the Guaranteed Income program for the extra cash, and offers them $3 per hour, minus $1 per hour for each child they bring to work with them.
Now a mommy at work with her two kids is receiving $692 from the government and $40 from her employer every week, and she’s working full time.
The entrepreneur can now offer families DayCare that costs half of what it costs today.
This means it is less expensive to get your house cleaned, your yard picked up, and your clothes laundered. Low cost labor frees all of us to be more productive.
Tea partiers, I KNOW this is hard, but we OWE IT to fellow citizens to put an end to idleness once and for all. This is the Christian solution.
When our government created the Minimum Wage, we created a massive class of unemployable workers. The fact is many millions of people are not worth $7.25 per hour. This means that no matter how crafty the entrepreneur, he will not be able to make a profit off their labor; and if profit is impossible from their labor, the unskilled will be idle.
Progressives and evil economists like to talk about “excess capacity” and “aggregate demand”, but when we didn’t have Minimum Wage, we never had excess capacity… everyone worked, or they starved.
The Protestant work ethic all but implies that idleness is immoral. A Guaranteed Income system makes idleness almost IMPOSSIBLE. What’s more, a Guaranteed Income system allows ALL of us to be more productive because we pay less for the jobs we normally do ourselves.
Now watch this miracle. Currently our Federal Reserve is tasked with fighting inflation and unemployment. So when we have 9.5% unemployment, the Fed is legally justified in printing money. Right now we are dealing with another $600 BILLION in Quantitative Easing. Gas prices are up. Food prices are up.
But, with Guaranteed Income, we have no unemployment, so the Fed has one rule: don’t print money. This means our future prices grow much more slowly.
The costs are negligible.
Assuming this program is wildly popular and another 5 MILLION people claim to be unemployed, then we will have 20 MILLION in our Guaranteed Income system. The cost? $208 BILLION.
It is only $58 BILLION more than we spend on Unemployment Insurance ($150BILLION). This is less than a tenth of Medicare, Social Security, or Defense. $58 BILLION is less than five percent (5%) of Obama’s stimulus during the toughest of times.
And this assumes all 20MILLION are working for $3 per hour. If they make more than $3 per hour, the government pays less than $58BILLION.
What is it worth in tax revenue to put 20 Million idle bodies to work?
What is it worth to your savings to have 2% less inflation per year over the next ten years?
What is it worth to get low cost services and be more productive with your own time?
What is it worth to never hear the word “stimulus” again?
It is worth $58 BILLION? We are not heartless.
Tea Party babies! I know there are some of you that will gruffly say, “NO!” You will insist we should not even have a Minimum Wage. And you are right. But we cannot let perfect be the enemy of the good. When Tea Party politicians call for Guaranteed Income to replace Minimum Wage and Unemployment Insurance, progressives will be smote; they will be forced to argue nakedly for laziness.
This is a winning political issue. This is the loaves and fishes. It will give and give and give.
Minimum Wage truly is the “Devil’s tool.” They say God works in mysterious ways. Guaranteed Income works in an obvious way: it ensures there are no idle hands.
This is uncanny
Back in 1980 Richard Pryor portrayed himself as the first Black President in a comedy skit. It is hilarious. And uncanny. His portrayal is hauntingly today. I wish it weren't. Watch it here.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Canadian Mother Strangles Newborn, Gets No Jail Time and Judge Defends Infanticide By Comparing It t
In citing Canada’s abortion laws, an Edmonton appeal court ruled that an Alberta woman who strangled her son with her underwear after secretly giving birth in 2005, will face no guaranteed jail time. Katrina Effert was sentenced Friday for killing her newborn and then throwing the body over a fence ...
Exclusive: Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist Who Endorsed Obama Dissents! Resigns from American Physical
Nobel Laureate Dr. Ivar Giaever: 'The temperature (of the Earth) has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this 'warming' period.' -- Environmental news and analysis.
POLITICO44 is a new and innovative way to cover the Obama presidency, minute-by-minute. Powered by the largest White House staff around, it will be the go-to place for news and analysis about the president, the staff, the first lady, the vice president, and the new administration.
Robert Zubrin writes on NRO: Republican presidential contender Michele Bachman has said that if she is elected, gas prices will fall to $2 per gallon. Such promises have understandably been greeted with considerable skepticism. But $2 gas is exactly what America needs. The question is, how can we ge...
Jim Manzi writes on NRO: Megan McArdle and Arnold Kling (two bloggers who are very helpful in understanding the actual economy where we now live, by the way) make the point that life can be good when you have a comfortable job, but it’s dangerous, because it is likely to go away. Here’s Kling: A job...
Why President Obama is Failing - He doesn't know how to fail
President Obama;s biggest problem is that his life experience hasn't prepared him with the mechanisms for dealing with failure. Most people who reach the age of 50 have the benefit of scraping their knees on the hard realities of life. Most people learn not to take those things personally, but to recognize a failure when we see it, and do something about it (first step – admit you have a problem!). Our President hasn't had the benefit of these character building events.
Before being President, he hadn't experienced failure. both of his autobiographies make it clear, that this is the mercurial career and life of a man in a hurry. The result of life pattern is that we now have a man who mistakes failures for personal attacks by his opponents. Rather than take corrective steps ( sometimes called in military strategy a ‘retreat’) he doubles down, because he cant accept the idea of the “other side winning”.
Where that puts us as a society is that we are in the position of being led by someone who simply can't back away from a bad idea because if he did, then someone might notice that he doesn’t know what he’s doing, and we simply can't have that now can we?
Before being President, he hadn't experienced failure. both of his autobiographies make it clear, that this is the mercurial career and life of a man in a hurry. The result of life pattern is that we now have a man who mistakes failures for personal attacks by his opponents. Rather than take corrective steps ( sometimes called in military strategy a ‘retreat’) he doubles down, because he cant accept the idea of the “other side winning”.
Where that puts us as a society is that we are in the position of being led by someone who simply can't back away from a bad idea because if he did, then someone might notice that he doesn’t know what he’s doing, and we simply can't have that now can we?
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
The disappearance of the permanent job and YOU
The new normal in the days to come may be where all employment in the form of a permanent job disappears. A world where EVERYONE is an independent contractor (businessman) who can be terminated at any moment. No benefits. No pension. No security. No seniority. You are 1099d at the end of the year.
You have to live by your wits, ability and skill. Your income is directly reflected in your perceived value to those paying you right now. How will you prosper in that day? I ask because I believe this is the world we are entering and people are going to be shocked when it happens.
I have lived like this nearly my whole life. It's not that bad. You need to prove your value to those who employ you every day. It's as it should be.
If you have a job and you aren't living like this, start now, get used to being valuable.
It's a future you will live in someday.
You have to live by your wits, ability and skill. Your income is directly reflected in your perceived value to those paying you right now. How will you prosper in that day? I ask because I believe this is the world we are entering and people are going to be shocked when it happens.
I have lived like this nearly my whole life. It's not that bad. You need to prove your value to those who employ you every day. It's as it should be.
If you have a job and you aren't living like this, start now, get used to being valuable.
It's a future you will live in someday.
Monday, September 12, 2011
Government officials in Bethesda, Maryland, have decided to spent $4 million dollars to provide housing for 12 homeless people for one year. That’s right. The taxpayer will be providing free housing to a dozen folks in Maryland at the rate of $330,000 per person a year. This should raise some eyebro...
"By 1970, the governments of the wealthy countries began to take it for granted that they had truly discovered the secret of cornucopia. Politicians of left and right alike believed that modern economic policy was able to keep economies expanding very fast -- and endlessly. That left only the congen...
The Tea Party person calls his political opponents obscene names, then tells the reporter to leave the area (again using obscene language) and man-handles the cameraman. The Tea Party person also threatens further violence and damage to private property. The Tea Party member also makes obscene ges...
Many people thought Glenn Beck might have been a little bit crazy (little bit?) to leave the safety and support of traditional cable television to launch his internet-based GBTV enterprise. But the news from the Wall Street Journal today may cause even the critics some pause. Beck’s GBTV broadcast ...
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize Winner is an Idiot...or worse
I can't believe how vile and evil a man like Paul Krugman is. Read what he wrote:
What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.
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THE NEW BIG LIE … a lie that has been embedded into the conventional wisdom for almost a century. I refer to it as the Biggest Lie of All:
All you need to do is show up for work; we have experts who have the answers to your housing needs, your health care needs, your financial needs … no need to plan for your future or actively manage your career, since we can do a better job than you can; just trust us to solve those problems FOR you.
All my fifty-plus years (and many before that), we have been told this lie, in one form or another, by our economic, political and cultural elites. We have been told that others will take care of our challenges FOR us … and that we can’t do it better than they can … so why bother? Just let us “help”.
As a result of our belief in this lie, we have made the notion that one should be able to work at the same job, doing much the same thing, from school until retirement … all the while getting more and more as compensation and benefit … part of our conventional wisdom.
And in turn, millions have not kept their heads in the game — not working to keep their options open and/or prepare for hard times, by managing their careers and finances in ways that maintain their flexibility to respond to changing socio-economic conditions. They are at the tender mercies of the few at the top, and have to hope that they do right by the “little guy”.
Those at the top AREN’T getting it right, though … that is becoming more and more evident. What is not so evident, however, is that there was never any chance they could get it right for EACH and EVERY one of us, regardless of the purity of their intent!
The idea that a few experts in our government can manage myriad details of 300 million lifetimes from the top down, effectively and efficiently, makes going to the moon — a task that took tens of billions of dollars, tens of millions of man-hours, and tens of thousands of technical experts to put TWELVE men on the moon for a FEW DAYS each time — look, by comparison, like a mere exercise in LEGO(TM) assembly.
But what makes it impossible, is that a government that honors equal protection under the law and the protection of our civil liberties lacks the precision and insight to deal with every aspect of the problems we face. It can’t adequately discriminate between the truly needy and the slacker … and it can’t deal with the highly-individualized behavioral/educational/ethical choices that impact our finances and productivity.
Effectively, the experts of government have only two tools in their tool box … a bag of money, and a set of handcuffs. But because of the Biggest Lie of All, we have been led to believe that the “powerful” have the omniscience to solve our problems FOR us and save us from ourselves with only these tools.
What we should have been, and still be, doing … and some of us have … is instead of subordinating our careers and finances to the “wisdom” of our Best and Brightest, we take your advice at the end of this article, and think like businessmen ourselves … actively managing career and finances to optimize our value to the marketplace, and building support mechanisms to help us deal with hard times (because unlike the officers of a corporation, we can’t just walk away from a failure to support ourselves).
This is the entrepreneurial thinking you refer to above … and as you parenthetically state, it is not limited to the self-employed. Even employees (like myself) need to think like businessmen — even to the point of taking our services to a better employer, or place to live, if the earning potential, finances, and opportunities to enhance one’s market value are greater than where we’re at presently.
It means steering your education into a balance between how much you want to love your work, and how well you want to eat (realizing that the tasks you love might not have to involve full-time employment, but you need something to pay the grocery bill).
It means putting saving up an emergency fund, then saving for retirement, and buying health insurance at a higher priority in budgeting than iPhones and Starbucks … or getting into a McMansion in the right neighborhood, instead of renting until home ownership is a viable option (which for some people in mobile careers, may be “never”).
It means not looking for something for nothing, or to have others take from your fellow entrepreneurs in order to give you “what you deserve” … lest you have what you have advocated doing to others, be done to you later.
It means turning a listening ear to those with expertise — while retaining the decision-making authority, and control of resources, for yourself when it comes to the choice of implementing what the experts say.
It basically means taking responsibility for you and yours, instead of outsourcing it to a few Best and Brightest … who too often reveal themselves, once the decisions are made and the consequences become evident, to be (regardless of their credentials or resume) Dim Bulbs.