Curt Doolittle

Author: Curt Doolittle

  • When Has A Fact, Any Fact, Caused You To Radically Change Your Politics?

    When I read Hayek, Schumpeter and Hoppe I became a libertarian.

    https://www.quora.com/unanswered/When-has-a-fact-any-fact-caused-you-to-radically-change-your-politics

  • What Happened To Occupy Wall Street?

    OWS and The tea party are both likely to be long term phenomena caused by structural changes in the USA, and in the world economy.

    OWS still exists as a movement of sorts, but declined for two reasons:
    1) A failure to develop a platform of specific actions.  Movements need policy objectives and they didn’t propose them.  And leadership never emerged that could drive and negotiate them.
    2) The behavior of the members was deemed unacceptable:  In the 60’s the underclasses were emerging as a numeric force sufficient to create both a political and consumer class. Further, their behavior was a rejection of the war, the postwar strategic nuclear threats, and the rigidity of their parent’s disciplined ‘war’ generation.  These other factors are not in play at this time, so while the movement succeeded in propagating the 1% message, they discredited themselves by what the majority consider ‘uncivic’ behavior.

    https://www.quora.com/What-happened-to-Occupy-Wall-Street

  • 2012 U.s. Elections: Who Is Currently The Front Runner Of The United States Presidential Race?

    Go visit Intrade.com.  Monitor it there. It’s quite accurate. 

    The electorate is polarized with only about 12-15% of people uncommitted to one party or the other.  Elections are determined by these uncommitted people.  These uncommitted people tend to vote based upon what their friends tell them.  Many people do not vote policy they vote likability. Because it is easier to understand than policy is. Obama is still personally likable even if he is an unsuccessful president.  If the economy improves he will likely be reelected, and if it declines again, then not.  Key factors will be the price of oil and the conflict between Iran and Israel, and how well his opponent connects with voters after the convention. 

    If I had to bet money I would say that at present he will win by a very thin margin, if the issue with Iran does not peak, and if there are no surprises.

    https://www.quora.com/2012-U-S-Elections-Who-is-currently-the-front-runner-of-the-United-States-presidential-race

  • How Is An Economic Stimulus Package Supposed To Work?

    There are a series of possible stimuli available from the short term to the long term.
    1) Spending – Fiscal Policy: the government borrows money, then spends it on any number of projects.  This puts money in the hands of consumers, consumers spend on things not related to the projects, and businesses respond in order to serve demand. Their employees spend too, and the cycle expands.  Problem? It takes a long time for money to move into the economy.
    2) Monetary Policy: the government borrows money and then auctions it off at low rates.  Bankers buy this ‘cheap’ money and sell it as lower cost loans to business and the public.  Problem? Sometimes (now) no matter how low you make the cost of credit (effectively zero) people will not borrow it.
    3) Trade Policy. Sometimes you can tax or reduce taxes on goods and services to make them cheaper or more expensive. So, for example, if you want to create jobs in say, clothing manufacture, you highly tax clothing imports.  Problem: this just makes goods and services more expensive for consumers, so it has to be paired with monetary policy.
    4) Industrial policy: what we did with the auto companies. You find a way to create or expand industries that create jobs or create demand.
    5) Education policy: train or retrain your population to produce goods and services that are desired, when the goods and services they produce are no longer as desirable.

    Most of the time, governments quickly adjust monetary policy then they try spending policy.  The argument today is that we should spend more. The problem is that people don’t trust their government to spend it wisely, and they therefore prefer to suffer a slower economy than fund bad behavior in government.

    https://www.quora.com/How-is-an-economic-stimulus-package-supposed-to-work

  • Can Scrum/agile Project Management Be Used Effectively In A Digital Agency?

    I agree with Dave, despite being an advocate of Scrum in most circumstances.

    A controversial argument:

    Scrum was developed for:
    1) Small teams of  talented people.
    2) Strong buy in from the client(s) who are effectively members of the team.
    3) To compensate for the evolutionary accumulation of knowledge as development progresses.

    HOWEVER
    1) It is less contractually defensible without extraordinary change control – the causal relationship between goal, budget and what is accomplished is often open to greater risk of litigation or loss.
    2) Clients are often comprised of different factions attempting to undermine each other, and conflicts not resolved in contracts are often impossible to avoid, leaving the agency exposed to failure, caused by the client discord.
    3) There are a lot of people in the industry who lack the discipline to work in this manner, and the addition of contractors often exacerbates the problem.
    4) It used to be more difficult for agencies to attract top technical talent.  This is declining but is still, to some degree, true.

    INFORMED OPINION
    Is that it is better suited to teams who work together all the time, and in particular for product development, and less comforting to use in high risk environments with a significant amount of customer management.

    Given the tendency of the major agencies to have less trusting delivery relationships with their clients I would have to approach any question extremely cautiously less one or two major failures a year remove all perceived benefit from the broader financial and relationship questions.

    https://www.quora.com/Can-scrum-agile-project-management-be-used-effectively-in-a-digital-agency

  • Why Do Libertarians Treat Social Order And Civil Society As Free Goods?

    They don’t. While it costs nothing to abstain from theft, fraud and violence, it costs something to administer defense and disputes.  The libertarian argument is that these things can be produced by private organizations. They have produced a great deal of work that demonstrates how and why that private production of defense is both possible and preferable.

    The European monarchies were private governments, and there were political parties and labor unions and a great deal of diversity, with many cities having different neighborhoods for each ethnic group.  The monarchies were less warlike, taxed people much less, provided public services and had active civil societies.   Not that we should return to monarchies but the point is that these things can, and have worked.

    The problem with government is a bureaucracy. If you were to privatize everything, you would come close the the libertarian idea.

    https://www.quora.com/Why-do-libertarians-treat-social-order-and-civil-society-as-free-goods

  • Is Charity “a Capitalist And Conservative Project”?

    There are plenty of treatments of the subject that discuss the decline of the ‘civic society’ and decline of ‘civic participation’ in society, because the state has destroyed the motivation for, and the ability of people to engage in civic behavior.  The ‘corporatization and bureaucratization’ of charity. The reason is ostensibly that conservatism provides charity in exchagne for adherence to established norms, and progressives reject adherence to established norms, and requrie that charity require no action in exchange.

    So in that sense, yes, it is a conservative project to create a CIVIC, menaing, voluntary, society. And a progressive project to create a STATIST, meaning ‘managed’ society.

    https://www.quora.com/Is-charity-a-capitalist-and-conservative-project

  • Have Any Corporations Embraced Equitable Or Just Compensation Models?

    Um.. This is one of those problems that’s really nonsense. 

    All employees should be compensated at market rates. Otherwise if you are lower, they won’t stay, if they are over, your competition will eat you.

    Compensation is not equitable WITHIN A COMPANY. It is equitable across ALL COMPANIES.

    Do not fall into the trap of confusing the ‘fiarness’ of a family, with the alliance of people that work together in a company.

    https://www.quora.com/Have-any-corporations-embraced-equitable-or-just-compensation-models

  • THE TOP THEORETICAL TAX RATE REALY 70% OR IS IT REALLY 50%? This article discuss

    http://www.nationalreview.com/agenda/300373/guest-post-arpit-gupta-saez-and-diamond-taxes-arpit-guptaIS THE TOP THEORETICAL TAX RATE REALY 70% OR IS IT REALLY 50%?

    This article discusses top tax rates in tolerably accessible terms.

    I’ll buy that it’s 48%, depending upon where it’s graduated. But as I’ve stated repeatedly, it has to be constructed on a rolling average of income, not that of a single year, which penalizes the middle class for rare events that pay for their retirements. Otherwise there is no 1% (or the more accurate .017%) because something close to 30% of people end up in that high tax bracket at some time in their lives, and that’s too big a block to alienate through aggressive taxation that threatens their retirement savings that come from almost entirely from rare events.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-05-19 17:47:00 UTC

  • would like to see a similar chart containing the social class of the protagonist

    http://io9.com/5911520/a-chart-that-reveals-how-science-fiction-futures-changed-over-timeI would like to see a similar chart containing the social class of the protagonists (Futurama:lower, Gibson: lower middle, Star Trek: Middle, Asimov: upper middle, Herbert’s Dune: Upper.) Because I think that would tell us just as much about class changes as it does about the presence of technological change.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-05-19 16:59:00 UTC