Curt Doolittle

Form: Mini Essay

  • WHY ARE CONTRACTS A MESS? 0) Reality: all contracts are just form letters with n

    WHY ARE CONTRACTS A MESS?

    0) Reality: all contracts are just form letters with names and dates in them. All that changes is the list of assets, and the rights and obligations of both parties – and mostly, it’s the obligations for both parties, ’cause rights only exist if the contract fails. The courts have spent decades since the rise of text databases in the 80’s making sure that there is settled law for almost everything you can bring before it – so much so that the only job left in court is who either (a) lied, or (b) failed due diligence (c ) sought an unearned premium at the other’s expense.

    1)Surprisingly lawyers are taught contract law, not how to write contracts. And they will write for other lawyers most of the time, sometimes for in-house counsel, other times for skilled people, and otherwise for ordinary citizens. So absent this they learn to write contracts by the cut-and-paste method of contract development. So contracts accumulate ‘waste’ so to speak in most offices. They don’t accumulate solutions to problems.

    The courts (federal, state, local) do not put out standard contract formats that force what’s called “transactional” work into standard form. When in reality, the law does not grant much flexibility in these matters.

    Terms of art are largely bullshit claims. Judges are not stupid. Jurors are not stupid.

    The reality is that contracts are not complicated. My particular ‘thing’ is shareholder agreements. They don’t have to be complicated. They have to hit al the points in simple language. All contracts are like this, if (a) definitions are put on a separate page, (b) the before-and-after diagrams are displayed in visual form, ( c) a project-plan for signing the agreements in the appropriate sequence and the purpose of each one is stated in that plan (document), that states the title or interest change it enacts. (think of it as an accounting transaction with ledger entries). (d) each section includes a whereas “this is what we seek to accomplish” and therefore the terms of the contract in legal prose. (lawyers will resist this because it prevents people from pulling shit out of thin air, but that’s exactly why to do it.

    And this is the most simple – just capture the bullet list of concerns from everyone involved and make sure you’ve resolved them satisfactorily for all parties.

    And this is the most uncomfortable: Those engaging the contract do not inform the lawyers of the full suite of advantages that may arise from the deal, and the lawyers do not list all the reasons that they think the contract (arrangement) will fail.

    Truth: I generally have to tell lawyers to let me manage risk (that’s my job as a business person) and you create the level of contract suitable to my target risk. This is how you ‘Price’ a contract so to speak. By risk reward and resource expenditure *your time*.

    2) Current legal training is antithetical to business, because it begins as teaching the adversarial method – it does not teach means of reaching compromise, settlement, or methods of cooperation that must adapt to changing circumstances. This leads people in defense to ‘double down’ on conflict rather than double down on compromise. This is not how business people resolve conflicts. So really there are two stages. the ones exterior to the contract, and the terms that will fight before the court if the contract fails. My understanding is that this is a problem of failing to require via positiva statements of intent for every via-negativa bit of blame. In other words contracts do not spend time on the via positiva means of settling error, failure of due diligence, change in circumstance.

    3) The legal teams try to add unnecessary value to justify jobs (this is endemic). I see this all over the place. The problem is malincentives in legal fees: especially hourly. The problem is revenue constraints. In other words we have too many lawyers, working too hard, to drive up fees, and a court that doesn’t stop it, and a population that has no choice.

    4) Courts work too often by win/lose instead of proportional settlements. This is partly by design to force settlement prior to court, and then turning the courtroom into a lottery of uncertainty, where the outcome is worse than settlement – it is not what the framers or common law judges in history intended.

    5) Irreciprocal competency and scale of legal teams means they compete for providing opportunities for advantage rather than due diligence in preventing advantage.

    6) systemic abandonment of moral norms has led to the need to articulate what was normative in law.

    7) the law is lagging behind the rate of evolution of the complexity of contracts.

    8) The law does not prevent entrapments as it used to, because it defers to the wisdom of business people (good) but not to baiting into hazard.

    9) Law does not punish (as it used to) abuses of the court, the law, the contract so it is worthwhile for full time legal teams or lawyers to bill by the hour to use the economics to drive a settlement or court decision.

    That’s just the surface.

    Source date (UTC): 2020-01-05 17:23:00 UTC

  • ECONOMICS IS JUST AN EXTENSION OF PHYSICS We can quantify all sorts of metrics o

    ECONOMICS IS JUST AN EXTENSION OF PHYSICS

    We can quantify all sorts of metrics of human behavior, but you’re confusing mathematics with physics, the same way most people confuse averages with instances or distributions. In other words, mathematics describes averages of points in time, it doesn’t not describe operations.Mathematics consist of operations that describe states and changes in states and averages. But not the underlying operations. Physics studies both the quantitative and the operational. Mathematics just the quantitative (positional). So while mathematics describes ‘sums’ operations describe changes in state.

    Here:

    At every “level’ of reality we discover an underlying limited number of operations (Grammar) producing some set of symmetries (outcomes, equilibria), and above that a new limited number of operations (Grammar, outcomes, equilibria)) that produce another set of symmetries, and above that and so on.

    So, we don’t yet know what causes the quantum level

    We have a fairly good idea what causes the subatomic level.

    we have a very good idea what causes the atomic level.

    We have such a good understanding of chemistry that it’s boring.

    We are getting a fair understanding of biochemistry (and that it’s mechanical).

    We are getting a beginning understanding of proteins (and that it’s mechanical(operational) )

    We are getting a beginning understanding of genetic reproduction (and that it’s mechanical- operational) .

    We are getting a fairly good understanding of cells.

    We have a more than fairly good understanding of multi-cellular (complex) organisms.

    I’ll stop there since I think you can see the pattern of some set of physically possible operations producing a finite set of physically possible states, followed by another set of physically possible operations producing a finite set of physically possible states, and that this process continues indefinitely, all the way to what we call consciousness.

    Now life buys us conservation of energy (defeat of entropy), but it’s still bound by the laws of physics (the underlying grammars).

    Memory buys us prediction. And prediction provides our ability to perform operations (actions) that improve our defeat of entropy.

    Increase in neural( brain) volume provides Competition between predictions, which provides us choices of options for defeating entropy.

    Increase in Brain volume provides iterations on predictions for increasing choices of defeating entropy the sequence of actions (or inactions for that matter).

    Increase in brain volume provides prediction of others predictions and predicting opportunities for cooperation that further improve our ability to capture and use energy by defeating entropy.

    Human ability to capture energy is limited by the grammar of human action (possible actions and sequences of actions and parallel combinations of other’s actions).

    So the grammar of human action consists in the physical, emotional-intuitionistic, and cognitive operations.

    Those operations are bounded by physical limitations of the grammars upon which they are constructed.

    Both Physics and Economics are bound by the same underlying grammars (laws) but because humans have memories, prediction, sentience, and consciousness, reason, calculation, symbolism, and computation, we can use debts and credits with each other to temporarily lend to each other, in presumption of future returns on that investment or debt.

    We don’t violate that physical law. Because humans observe reciprocity (equilibrium) just as the physical world obeys equilibrium (entropy). If we didn’t we wouldn’t be here.

    And so some people specialize in capitalization (productivity) and some people specialize in consumption, and others in parasitism or predation.

    But in the end, over time, we are limited by the physical laws of the universe. We can create productivity (as does life), or we can parasite upon other lives (as do bacteria and viruses).

    We cannot run the clock on parasitism (Socialism or gypsies) or conquest (islamism) forever because we will run out of hosts to prey upon.

    So economics is just physics with debits and credits (ability t steal, to borrow, to exchange,to produce, or to save) made possible by consciousness, by test of reciprocity (account balances), within the limit of proportionality (exit).

    TRIANGLE:

    What limits to human operations?

    ………………What Limits?……………….

    ………………………|…………………………

    …………….Human Actions……………..

    ……………..Consciousness…………….

    …………………Sentience………………..

    …………………….Life………………………

    …………………./………\……………………

    ……….subatomic..macro-atomic…..

    ………………./…………..\…………………

    ……….?Limits………….Limits?…………

    Human limits are reciprocity (positive) with the limits of proportionality (negaitve).

    The subatomic level appears to run out of energy by maximum dissipation.

    The macro atomic level appears to run out of ability to compress energy.

    Sorry but it’s just Physics with the ability to use each other for debt and credit that we call ‘cooperation”.

    Source date (UTC): 2020-01-05 15:53:00 UTC

  • ECONOMICS IS JUST AN EXTENSION OF PHYSICS We can quantify all sorts of metrics o

    ECONOMICS IS JUST AN EXTENSION OF PHYSICS

    We can quantify all sorts of metrics of human behavior, but you’re confusing mathematics with physics, the same way most people confuse averages with instances or distributions. In other words, mathematics describes averages of points in time, it doesn’t not describe operations.Mathematics consist of operations that describe states and changes in states and averages. But not the underlying operations. Physics studies both the quantitative and the operational. Mathematics just the quantitative (positional). So while mathematics describes ‘sums’ operations describe changes in state.

    Here:

    At every “level’ of reality we discover an underlying limited number of operations (Grammar) producing some set of symmetries (outcomes, equilibria), and above that a new limited number of operations (Grammar, outcomes, equilibria)) that produce another set of symmetries, and above that and so on.

    So, we don’t yet know what causes the quantum level

    We have a fairly good idea what causes the subatomic level.

    we have a very good idea what causes the atomic level.

    We have such a good understanding of chemistry that it’s boring.

    We are getting a fair understanding of biochemistry (and that it’s mechanical).

    We are getting a beginning understanding of proteins (and that it’s mechanical(operational) )

    We are getting a beginning understanding of genetic reproduction (and that it’s mechanical- operational) .

    We are getting a fairly good understanding of cells.

    We have a more than fairly good understanding of multi-cellular (complex) organisms.

    I’ll stop there since I think you can see the pattern of some set of physically possible operations producing a finite set of physically possible states, followed by another set of physically possible operations producing a finite set of physically possible states, and that this process continues indefinitely, all the way to what we call consciousness.

    Now life buys us conservation of energy (defeat of entropy), but it’s still bound by the laws of physics (the underlying grammars).

    Memory buys us prediction. And prediction provides our ability to perform operations (actions) that improve our defeat of entropy.

    Increase in neural( brain) volume provides Competition between predictions, which provides us choices of options for defeating entropy.

    Increase in Brain volume provides iterations on predictions for increasing choices of defeating entropy the sequence of actions (or inactions for that matter).

    Increase in brain volume provides prediction of others predictions and predicting opportunities for cooperation that further improve our ability to capture and use energy by defeating entropy.

    Human ability to capture energy is limited by the grammar of human action (possible actions and sequences of actions and parallel combinations of other’s actions).

    So the grammar of human action consists in the physical, emotional-intuitionistic, and cognitive operations.

    Those operations are bounded by physical limitations of the grammars upon which they are constructed.

    Both Physics and Economics are bound by the same underlying grammars (laws) but because humans have memories, prediction, sentience, and consciousness, reason, calculation, symbolism, and computation, we can use debts and credits with each other to temporarily seize and advantage and then later return to equilibrium by repayment of the cooperation.

    We don’t violate that physical law. Because humans observe reciprocity (equilibrium) just as the physical world obeys equilibrium (entropy).

    And some people specialize in capitalization (productivity) and some people specialize in consumption, and others in parasitism or predation.

    But in the end, over time, we are limited by the physical laws of the universe. We can create productivity (as does life), or we an parasite upon other lives (as do bacteria and viruses).

    We cannot run the clock on parasitism (Socialism or gypsies) or conquest (islamism) forever because we will run out of hosts to prey upon.

    So economics is just physics with debits and credits (ability t steal, to borrow, to exchange,to produce, or to save) made possible by consciousness, by test of reciprocity (account balances), within the limit of proportionality (exit).

    TRIANGLE:

    What limits to human operations?

    ………………What Limits?……………….

    ………………………|…………………………

    …………….Human Actions……………..

    ……………..Consciousness…………….

    …………………Sentience………………..

    …………………….Life………………………

    …………………./………\……………………

    ……….subatomic..macro-atomic…..

    ………………./…………..\…………………

    ……….?Limits………….Limits?…………

    Human limits are reciprocity (positive) with the limits of proportionality (negaitve).

    The subatomic level appears to run out of energy by maximum dissipation.

    The macro atomic level appears to run out of ability to compress energy.

    Sorry but it’s just Physics with the ability to use each other for debt and credit that we call ‘cooperation”.

    Source date (UTC): 2020-01-05 13:53:00 UTC

  • ON WRITING FICTION All the time in every submission, every publisher’s read of i

    ON WRITING FICTION

    All the time in every submission, every publisher’s read of it, and every rejection of it, and every reaction to rejection, and every thought about your reaction to rejection is a reflection of the time that you didn’t put into researching people, places, and things, that would fill your head with possibilities for novelty that would inform the reader, capture the reader’s attention, and increase the chance of publication.

    All entertainment is novelty seeking. Human experience is translated in to emotion, and into memory, and into auto-association, an later contemplation by its degree of novelty.

    If you aren’t teaching the reader something new about others, about life, about people, about places, about things, or asking the reader to outwit you and your characters, you’re wasting your time, the editors time, the publisher’s time and the reader’s time – if you ever manage to get one.

    1. Learning the archetypes and the plots is trivial.

    2. Adapting them to contemporary life takes a bit of thought.

    3. Informing the reader about life takes more thought.

    4. Planting clues for the reader to speculate where the plot is going takes a bit more thought.

    5. Planting outwitting the reader’s speculation takes more thought.

    6. Novel combinations of all the above takes much more thought.

    7. More characters and more plot lines and more sets of clues takes much more thought.

    8. Using all of the above to teach the audience a philosophy for the present, a state of the world in the past or future – a system of thought that reframes the world – that is what literature means.

    9. Doing #8 so that you capture the essence of the age in the myths of the age: theology, fantasy, science fiction, fiction, biography, history, philosophy, law or science is extremely difficult and those that endure are extremely rare.

    But in the end, answer the question every art, music, literature, play, and script professional will ask you?

    1. Are you engaging in therapy?

    2. Are you engaging in escapism?

    3. Are you engaging in self-entertainment?

    4. Are you engaging in approval-seeking?

    5. Are you engaging in business or entrepreneurship?

    6. Are you engaging in craftsmanship or engineering (production)?

    7. Are you engaging in entertainment (novelty)?

    9. Are you engaging in politics or propaganda?

    9. Are you engaging in philosophy?

    10. Are you engaging in art?

    The amount of knowledge that you must reflect in, or incorporate in your work increases with scale.

    Postmodernism is a cancer on mankind – as bad as monotheism was in the past.

    But we are almost done with it.

    We are in a period of chaos.

    The period before the great change.

    We require authors to create a new vision.

    We live the vision of technology created in 1980 by William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Bruce Sterling.

    We live in the vision of civilization destruction created by Derrida.

    We live in the literary model of GRR Martin’s Futility of heroism, where the meek inherit the devastated earth.

    We live in the reverse gender model of harry (Harriet) Potter vs Hermione (Herman) Granger.

    We live in the political order of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

    What are you bringing to the table in exchange for others attention?

    Because they couldn’t care less, nor should they, about your therapy, escapism, self-entertainment, approval seeking, entrepreneurship, and they expect at least craftsmanship and production quality in exchange for not only their (increasingly trivial) money, and (increasingly costly) attention.

    I’ve taught creativity for decades and it’s trivial.

    1. Fill the shelves of your mind with everything possible until you have so many ideas you can’t choose among them.

    2. Sketch characters, locations, things, incentives, and obstacles.

    3. Sketch plots (arcs)

    That’s filling your head.

    4. Write scenes with beginning middle and end.

    5. Write chapters with beginning middle and end.

    6. Write arcs with beginning middle and end.

    7. Write stories with beginning middle and end.

    The rest is editing- be merciless.

    You want to feel your way through a writing book, but you can’t feel your way through emptiness. Give yourself resources to work with. Otherwise you’re just using free association to create a poor imitation of whatever authors you’ve read who did what you didn’t.

    Source date (UTC): 2020-01-05 12:47:00 UTC

  • THE UNREASONABLE EFFECTIVENESS OF P-LOGIC(LAW) IN HUMAN SCIENCES: PARADIGMS(META

    THE UNREASONABLE EFFECTIVENESS OF P-LOGIC(LAW) IN HUMAN SCIENCES: PARADIGMS(METAPHYSICS), PSYCHOLOGY, SOCIOLOGY, ECON, LAW, AND POLITICS

    P-Logic (Law) is (a) universally commensurable (b) value neutral, ( c) operational logic, of (d) decidability.

    Read that a few times and make sure you undrestand it. Universally commensurable, value neutral, operational logic, of decidability.

    The profound depth of that set of properties isn’t at all obvious, but just as saying math has extraordinary explanatory power in the physical sciences of constant temporal relations: P-logic (law) has equally extraordinary explanatory power in the cognitive sciences: paradigms(metaphysics), psychology, sociology, politics, group competitive strategy, ethics, and law.

    Physical sciences are mathematically predictive because categories and relations at a given resolution are constant both in and across time. The physical world can’t choose.

    Economic sciences are mathematically un-predictive, and only mathematically descriptive, and only operationally explanatory because relations (categories, weights(values), and operations) are inconstant across time – the consequence of Humans scheming and choosing with fragmentary and asymmetric information.

    Social Sciences are only operationally explanatory, not mathematically descriptive, nor mathematically predictive because while operations and incentives are constant, subject categories and values are inconstant, and unpredictable because humans scheme and choose using fragmentary and asymmetric information.

    P-Logic(law) provides universal explanatory power across the disciplines. Predictive power decreases with the inconstancy of relations over time. Many can create arbitrary relations within the limits of his perception, cognition, incentives, negotiation, and action, to plot and scheme against the course of events such that by some action or inaction he captures more caloric gains or opportunity for those gains, or prevents losses of opportunity or gains, than he would by not acting or acting.

    Source date (UTC): 2020-01-04 12:01:00 UTC

  • RATES OF REPRODUCTION Family members in USA and Canada. from 1500’s onward. Comm

    RATES OF REPRODUCTION

    Family members in USA and Canada. from 1500’s onward.

    Common eight, ten, twelve children. Almost universal.

    Common to lose a wife in childbirth and have two.

    Birthrate Lasts through civil war, industrial revolution. Then drops to six then to four, then three, now to two or even one.

    Almost universally husband and wife 5 years apart.

    Very common for english protestant men to marry french protestant then french catholic women. (disagreeableness an obedience)

    But very class driven.

    Both sides of family start out military. Paternal stays military. As usual, middle ranks.

    Prosecution of French proceeded that of Irish.

    English tended to be more middle class, french more lower classes.

    Both sides of the family originate in normandy, Dolietta’s going to England with the norman conquest, but then to the states, and the french left to Newfoundland, New Brunswick, or the Quebec settlements on the St Laurence river. After the french lose, 1M french move to the states.

    Poor French women were ‘russian brides’ of New France (Quebec). I only see one or two of those. All colonies were private entrepreneurial ventures, not state funded until they became strategic. Families were recruited. Men recruited, and when necessary, women (wives) recruited. The farther north the more likely they were to return to europe upon fulfillment of their contract. This is important since we don’t think of mothering and running a household as a career, but a woman’s choice was to be some other house-owning woman’s servant, or to get her own house, and so it was almost always preferable to have your own house, husband, and children to assist in the labor of running a household and farm.

    My family’s ‘legendary’ prosecution of the catholics in every way possible is somewhat funny since a lot of the maternal line is french, and a lot of it is clearly catholic, and at least one of my maternal great-x grandmothers was prohibited from practice of her religion upon marriage.

    No ‘irish’ until my paternal grandmother’s era, but they were pre-famine colonists, all from the east of Ireland, and it was three or four generations after integration.

    The men in my family are all over the middle class – probably because they’ve been literate since at least the 900s – military, reverends, lawyers, craftsmen, businessmen, fewer “ordinary” farmers, but even artists. The english tradition was farming in farm season and craftsmanship in off season, and warfare during the warring (high testosterone) summer months.

    All new englanders are inbred. Seriously. Until the Irish and Italians everyone was somehow related. 😉

    I love my NE people. they’re political ass clowns. But I love them anyway. And they make good business people and soldiers. They just need a monarchy to keep from virtue signaling themselves to death.

    Source date (UTC): 2020-01-04 11:17:00 UTC

  • We do not dispute the obvious, only the intuitive. Men and women do not differ i

    We do not dispute the obvious, only the intuitive. Men and women do not differ in task performance: the concrete – at least over time, but we differ in bias: the intuitionistic – at least in the immediate.

    When all other knowledge, reason, and experience fails, we are left with intuition, and the female herd empathic-interpersonal consumptive dysgenic of numbers will compete with the male analytic-political pack productive eugenic of quality for the simple reason that these are our reproductive strategies.

    Even as such, they are useful like most generalizations at scale, when we are discussing aggregates and biases, since men and women each contain a portfolio of traits and various masculine to feminine biases.

    This axis (protecting children regardless of males who are in charge versus protecting assets including territory, resources, women, children from other men who would deprive us of them) is pervasive and when a bias is evident and it is counter-rational, it is this bias driving it.

    Source date (UTC): 2020-01-02 18:36:00 UTC

  • NOTES ON CORP OWNERSHIP REFORM Legal Perspective True: “The purpose of the corpo

    NOTES ON CORP OWNERSHIP REFORM

    Legal Perspective

    True: “The purpose of the corporation is to do anything lawful.” And “Corporations are real, shareholders are a fiction.” In other words, shareholders are not owners. Companies do not work to maximize shareholder value. That is a fiction to sell investors.

    A management team balances brand awareness, market share, customers, employees, bankers, investors, and vendors, each of which is competing to maximize their take of the profits if their are any.

    Thoughts: (a) Owners ‘invest’ to obtain income and appreciation but lack liquidity.

    (b) Shareholders function as lenders who purchase liquidity and opportunity for dividends and appreciation – they are not owners, that is the myth.

    (c) From the company’s perspective, dividends and appreciation are the cost of maintaining borrowing capacity in capital markets so that opportunities can be seized by rapid appeal to capital markets.

    (d) Boards of other than owners are a wast of time money and energy – a kabuki theater – and instead, companies should be, and are, insured to act in the interest of their contract with the shareholders. The very best you can say about boards is (i) you can pay people for relationships, assistance, and information. (ii) when you are unsure and want to bounce ideas off peers rather than employees but be sure it won’t leak, they’re useful. (iii) preparing for board meetings makes sure that you and your team are on the same page and understand your own business. (iv) I use my boards exclusively to test my ideas and rarely do anything if I can’t convince them unanimously. This tempers my too-high risk tolerance. It gives me political cover with the staff and others if I make a mistake.

    (e) It’s not even clear that financial reports other than to auditors and insurers are of any value other than in selling to lenders (shareholders). Randomly select financial reports from your favorite companies. You will learn far more from analyst calls.

    (f) Trying to maintain or improve shareholder value, is a terrible practice because investment cycles (capital requirements necessary for returns) have been increasing, and the division of production distribution and trade fragmenting, but lifespan of companies are decreasing – for this very reason. Innovators dilemmas everywhere. No one tries to maximize shareholder value. That’s nonsense. You try to preserve it. the objective of nearly every business is to preserve it’s existence as a going concern for all those involved: customers, employees, owners, vendors, investors. It is very hard to build a business that produces a durable income stream because the customer vendor employee network is the most difficult organization to produce.

    (g) There is no reason whatsoever that companies should direct resources to ‘charities’ or ‘movements’, instead of requiring such donations come from individuals. Social responsibly is a code word for rent-seeking because the government is incapable of providing results. The current condition is that companies are frequently blackmailed if they don’t contribute to certain causes. That’s an injustice. That one shall do no harm is the best an organization can do and is the best therefore we can ask them to do.

    Lastly unless you’ve run a company of at least say, 50M, and preferably over 100M you have no idea just how difficult it is to produce a profit. (i) My primary complaint is that companies do not themselves maintain accounting for operations (cash: profit and loss from operations), management (ops plus overhead), owners (ops, overhead, assets, and yes, market share ), lenders (EBITDA), and the state (taxes, amortization, and depreciation).

    Most executives I’ve consulted, companies I’ve acquired, or accounting departments I’ve fought with, have too poor a grasp of operations and obscure it by conflating accounting data so to obscure normal volatility and variation in risk from investors and lenders, and to minimize taxes.

    Drive employee quality, operations, marketshare, and leave everything else to finance and accounting. Money is just another resource provided by vendors.

    Source date (UTC): 2020-01-01 20:47:00 UTC

  • MEANINGFUL NEW YEAR DATA DEBTIFICATION #3 Global stocks have increased in value

    MEANINGFUL NEW YEAR DATA

    DEBTIFICATION

    #3 Global stocks have increased in value by more than 25 trillion dollars over the past 10 years.

    #4 In the United States, 84 percent of all stocks are owned by the wealthiest 10 percent of all Americans.

    #5 The U.S. government is now more than 23 trillion dollars in debt.

    #12 Total U.S. household debt is about to cross the 14 trillion dollar mark.

    FINANCIALIZATION

    #13 A study that was recently released found that 70 percent of all Americans are struggling financially right now.

    #14 The average family in the United States cannot afford to buy a home in 71 percent of the country.

    #15 58 million jobs in the United States pay less than $793 a week.

    #16 According to the Social Security Administration, 50 percent of all Americans make less than $33,000 a year.

    #17 63 percent of the jobs that have been created in the United States since 1990 have been low wage jobs.

    #42 Almost one-third of all U.S. Millennials are still living with their parents.

    DESOCIALIZATION

    #27 Over the past decade, the suicide rate among young Americans has risen by 56 percent.

    #28 The suicide rate for the overall population increased by 41 percent between 1999 and 2016.

    IDIOCRACY

    #29 One survey has discovered that 15-year-old students in China are almost four full grade levels ahead of 15-year-old students in the United States in mathematics.

    #30 A different survey discovered that one-third of all American teenagers haven’t read a single book in the past year.

    FORNICATION

    #33 23 percent of all U.S. children live with a single parent. That is the highest rate in the entire world by a wide margin.

    #34 Today, approximately 40 percent of all babies in America are born to unmarried women.

    #35 The U.S. fertility rate has fallen 15 percent since 2007 and is now at the lowest level ever recorded.

    CALIFORNICATED

    #38 Today, almost half of all homeless people in the entire nation live in the state of California.

    #39 Over half of all California voters have considered leaving the state.

    DECIVILIZATION

    #40 According to an American Bar Association survey, only 38 percent of all Americans know that the U.S. Constitution is the highest law in the land.

    #41 58 percent of American adults under the age of 35 agree that some version of socialism “would be good for the country”.

    #43 According to the Pew Research Center, only 65 percent of Americans now consider themselves to be Christians. That is the lowest level ever recorded.

    #49 A survey that was conducted a couple of months ago found that 67 percent of all Americans believe that we are “on the edge of civil war”.

    RESTORATION

    #51 A majority of Propertarians believe they can solve these problems by reorganizing society with their new constitution.

    See what I did there? 😉

    —

    Source: Michael Snyder from The Economic Collapse Blog

    Source date (UTC): 2020-01-01 09:19:00 UTC

  • “Between the US, the EU, Russia, and China, what do you think is the most capita

    —“Between the US, the EU, Russia, and China, what do you think is the most capitalist society?”—

    The Capitalism vs Communism dichotomy is a fabrication of the Marxists to distract from the reality that:

    (a) all states must practice **mixed economies**, with state centralization solving market limitations at the cost of poor capital efficiency and high corruption, until private capital can decentralize production and increase capital efficiency and decrease corruption; Advanced economies must innovate and require markets (private sector) majority production, and backward economies must catch up and create markets by state (public sector) majority production.

    (b) all states capable of collecting revenues either by investment and returns, taxation, interest collection, profiting from direct management, or all of the above, can choose whether to spend the income on **consumption (redistribution) or production( further investment)**. Those states that are unable to collect revenues can militarize the population (as did the soviets) and minimize wages so that the maximum resources can be directed to production of commons.

    (c) the question is whether one operates by **rule of law** that naturally produces markets, **rule by legislation** negotiated between classes, or **rule by regulation** by monopoly bureaucracy, or **rule by command (discretion)** by dictator.

    ANGLOSPHERE countries are by far – without even a close competitor – dependent upon rule of law, rule by legislation, and state funding basic research, but almost no state involvement in production – why? Because judges were always independent professionals and less subject to corruption.

    *Mixed Economy, Favoring Private Sector, and Rule of Law.*

    CONTINENTAL – countries practice the napoleonic law of rule by legislation and rule by regulation. Why? Because french judges were appointed or purchased their positions and napoleon could not trust them to refrain from discretionary rulings (making up law).

    *Mixed Economy, Favoring mixed public private sectors, and Rule of Legislation.*

    POST SOVIET – Countries are cripple by soviet legal codes, but while russia and ukraine have reformed their laws (ukrainian law is quite good really), the problem in both countries has been reducing corruption that was endemic under the soviets in all walks of life. Although we must compliment Putin on tripling the number of cases in in the courts, even if he has not succeeded in preventing coercive thefts of businesses by state members (I could not find a single company to buy in Moscow because they must keep ‘fake’ books in order to prevent people in the government from conspiring to take over the business by confiscatory corruption.)

    *Mixed economy, Both Heavy public and Private sectors, and rule by legislation and rule by Regulation*

    INDIA. Indian law is fine. Like everything else in india, the engine of indian order is not the government but culture, tradition, and the family. Russia crosses eleven time zones but it’s still a country. America is an empire and each state or region a different country. Europe is trying and failing to repeat the american experiment and failing at the same time america is failing. India likewise is a continent and an empire not a country. India is unable to devote sufficient resources (for reasons we do not understand) to either providing speedy (timely) justice, or to producing sufficient infrastructure, given her people’s rates of reproduction. India lacks china’s authoritarianism and remains familialism which is both beautiful on the one hand but slows her rate of adaptation. Long term india will do wonderfully.

    *Mixed Economy, Favoring Private Sector, Rule by Legislation*

    CHINA has never practiced any semblance of law in the western sense, and instead has practiced arbitrary rule: **Rule by Command**, and **Rule by Regulation** and this seems to be the preference of the chinese people. China was a very poor (still is) backward country having made the mistake to reject modernity, then to embrace communism in order to prevent the south from seceding, leaving beijing in the north to rule poverty, and the commercial south to separate and join modernity. Mao would not tolerate this. After the failure of communism China saw the failure of the Soviets, and then the american defeat of the Iraqis, and this combination created today’s Chinese strategy of restoring her traditional position as the central power in east asia – despite all her neighbors fearing that china will also return to violence. Unlike india, china has a long history of monopoly authoritarian rule, and even more so, has the power of the Red Army (which really governs china’s factions). The chinese have a long history of pragmatism and reason – and almost no sense of the value of human life, and nothing approaching indian or european ethics. Secondly the chinese people are rather industrious and hard-working. So between authoritarian hierarchy, a means of enforcing political will with the army, a literate and intelligent hard working workforce, an endless supply of cheap labor, and endless debt capacity, and willingness to have an economic crash, china has been able to maximize state investment, migration of people into the workforce, and expansion of the military, and then to clamp down in response to an end to the boom. There is no question that for china, this is the optimum method of ‘catching up from behind’.

    *Mixed Economy, Heavily Favoring State Sector, Rule by Command*

    The most **capitalist** countries are those with the most rule of law and the most private sector. (*anglosphere*)

    The Most** mixed economies** are those with rule of legislation, a mix of private and state sector, (*continental*)

    The most **command economies **are those with the least rule of law and the most state sector (*china*)

    China has more successfully used debt capacity than any country in the world. This does not mean it is capitalist, since capitalism means bias to the private sector and minimizing the state sector.

    Source date (UTC): 2019-12-31 16:52:00 UTC