Curt Doolittle

Theme: Crisis

  • APPLE IS ALREADY ROTTING I didn’t want to stick my neck out last month and say t

    APPLE IS ALREADY ROTTING

    I didn’t want to stick my neck out last month and say that Apple’s brand is decaying. I thought the Steve Jobs worship was overdone. But, just as kings and queens tend to keep a populace holding positive sentiments, so does a heroic and visionary leader. Apple isn’t actually a very nice company. It pushes ethics to the limit and often beyond. When we saw the company anthropomorphized as a heroic Steve Jobs trying to fight for us by creating simple interfaces against the careless and mechanistic IBM/WIN-TEL behemoths, we forgave Apple its indiscretions. But if you follow the sentiments expressed online by pundits and average consumers it’s clear that they still want their iphones and ipads and macbooks. But it’s also clear that company that we see as Apple, is attracting negative sentiments rapidly. It’s a magnet for criticism.

    I’ve been toying with how to create a replacement identity for Apple – a persona that isn’t so much of a replacement for Jobs, but at least would allow the public human image that they believed was still fighting for them on their behalf. Anything I’d find attractive would be too obscure. Someone else might have more populist instincts. I’ve always felt that TMobile selected good representatives. Geico does a good job as well. But Apple needs something special. A person that they can trust – and I don’t see that person on the management team at apple. So it’s got to be an actor capable of engendering nerdy-artist consumer trust. I do NOT think creating a set of identities will work. Or that a populist brand will work.

    There are better people than I working on it. I’m more interested in simply recording that the problem exists and that it needs to be solved.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-02-10 10:59:00 UTC

  • ON THE LIST OF VULNERABLE COMPANY TOWNS Living in the Seattle are from 1985 to 2

    http://www.thestreet.com/story/11406713/1/10-totally-vulnerable-company-towns.htmlREDMOND ON THE LIST OF VULNERABLE COMPANY TOWNS

    Living in the Seattle are from 1985 to 2008 was an opportunity to take advantage of one of the most extraordinary micro-economies in history. However, even the best companies only stay on top for one or two decades before the innovator’s dilemma and bureaucratic rent seeking kick in and competition erodes the business. In 2006 I said that if the effects of the recession lasted as long as I thought — through 2014 (which seems optimistic now) — then home prices would never recover because the decline of the towns major employer would kick in before the broader economy.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-02-10 08:26:00 UTC

  • but we all KNOW that healthcare costs are the long term problem with the US budg

    http://www.multiplier-effect.org/?p=3351Yes, but we all KNOW that healthcare costs are the long term problem with the US budget.

    We also know WHY healthcare costs are the problem:

    1) extending the last year of life.

    2) experimental procedures.

    We also know why it’s a difficult problem to fix healthcare costs:

    3) Because there is no market system by which doctors can choose to deny coverage for experimental procedures and extending the last year of life. Because it is expressly against medical ethics. Because it is profitable for businesses to deliver services. Because it is bad for business to reject a customer, who will just go elsewhere for the service.

    4) Because there is no market system for controlling extension of the last year of life and experimental procedures, we must create a non-market system (a bureaucratic system) or “DEATH PANELS” to deny coverage for experimental procedures and extending the last year of life, in order to contain costs.

    We also know why bureaucratization of experimental procedures is dangerous:

    5) Because experimental work is expensive, research and development conducted by trial and error – most of which fails to produce beneficial results.

    We also know why conservatives (republicans) dislike the bureaucratic method:

    6) Because it is impossible to work harder, apply more discipline, and use one’s own initiative and resources, in order to secure access to the best doctors, facilities, and experimental treatments.

    And it’s disingenuous to argue that this is a financial problem. It is in fact, a series of moral hazards – in the broadest sense of the term.

    (The technical, mixed-economy solution, would be to transfer the costs that were rejected by the Death Panels for experimental procedures and extension of life to those poor people in need of health care. I’m not advocating that. I’m just suggesting that it’s the only known solution that avoids perverse incentives for all parties, while maintaining a closed healthcare ecosystem.)

    We already solve the problem of transfers by subsidizing insurance companies for automobile drivers. There is no reason that we cannot sponsor (insure) non-profit, insurance companies that specialize in coverage for the underclasses, and make use of the visa/mc network to manage payments for services. We insure banks. Why can’t we insure insurance companies as a proxy for serving the disadvantaged?

    Source date (UTC): 2012-01-20 14:35:00 UTC

  • EVERYTHING FRENCH IS BAD EXCEPT THE FOOD AND ARCHITECTURE

    A quote from Hans Hermann Hoppe:

    Hoppe also condemned the French revolution as belonging in “the same category of vile revolutions as the Bolshevik revolution and the Nazi revolution,” because the French revolution led to “Regicide, Egalitarianism, democracy, socialism, hatred of all religion, terror measures, mass plundering, rape and murder, military draft and the total, ideologically motivated War.”

    Let’s add to that a condemnation of French philosophers who twisted and then ruined the concept of English freedom by converting what had been a practical and empirical philosophy into an evangelical, ideological, verbally-empty absurdity which they used to justify taking power from and destroying both the monarchy and the catholic church — and by consequence they created the body of work that Marx would use to compose his irrational economic plague and pseudo-religion which in turn caused 160M deaths. Hitler is laughing in his grave. The Deutch Mark simply had to dress in Euro clothing in order to accomplish in only 20 years, profitably, and without firing a shot, what he had hoped to accomplish with his expensive purges and war. If you could to travel in time and kill only one religious philosopher in history at birth, it’s a tossup whether that should be Zoroaster, Abraham, Mohammed, Rousseau or Marx.

  • EVERYTHING FRENCH IS BAD EXCEPT THE FOOD AND ARCHITECTURE A quote from Hans Herm

    EVERYTHING FRENCH IS BAD EXCEPT THE FOOD AND ARCHITECTURE

    A quote from Hans Hermann Hoppe:

    Hoppe also condemned the French revolution as belonging in “the same category of vile revolutions as the Bolshevik revolution and the Nazi revolution,” because the French revolution led to “Regicide, Egalitarianism, democracy, socialism, hatred of all religion, terror measures, mass plundering, rape and murder, military draft and the total, ideologically motivated War.”

    Let’s add to that a condemnation of French philosophers who twisted and then ruined the concept of English freedom by converting what had been a practical and empirical philosophy into an evangelical, ideological, verbally-empty absurdity which they used to justify taking power from and destroying both the monarchy and the catholic church — and by consequence they created the body of work that Marx would use to compose his irrational economic plague and pseudo-religion which in turn caused 160M deaths.

    Hitler is laughing in his grave. The Deutch Mark simply had to dress in Euro clothing in order to accomplish in only 20 years, profitably, and without firing a shot, what he had hoped to accomplish with his expensive purges and war.

    If you could to travel in time and kill only one religious philosopher in history at birth, it’s a tossup whether that should be Zoroaster, Abraham, Mohammed, Rousseau or Marx.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-01-01 07:15:00 UTC

  • List of 20th Century Genocides

    The worst genocides of the 20th Century (160 million killed) – Mao Ze-Dong (China, 1958-61 and 1966-69, Tibet 1949-50) 49-78,000,000 – Jozef Stalin (USSR, 1932-39) 23,000,000 (the purges plus Ukraine’s famine) – Adolf Hitler (Germany, 1939-1945) 12,000,000 (concentration camps and civilians WWII) – Leopold II of Belgium (Congo, 1886-1908) 8,000,000 – Hideki Tojo (Japan, 1941-44) 5,000,000 (civilians in WWII) – Ismail Enver (Turkey, 1915-20) 1,200,000 Armenians (1915) + 350,000 Greek Pontians and 480,000 Anatolian Greeks (1916-22) + 500,000 Assyrians (1915-20) – Pol Pot (Cambodia, 1975-79) 1,700,000 – Kim Il Sung (North Korea, 1948-94) 1,600,000 (purges and concentration camps) – Menghistu (Ethiopia, 1975-78) 1,500,000 – Yakubu Gowon (Biafra, 1967-1970) 1,000,000 – Leonid Brezhnev (Afghanistan, 1979-1982) 900,000 – Jean Kambanda (Rwanda, 1994) 800,000 – Saddam Hussein (Iran 1980-1990 and Kurdistan 1987-88) 600,000 – Tito (Yugoslavia, 1945-1987) 570,000 – Sukarno (Communists 1965-66) 500,000 – Fumimaro Konoe (Japan, 1937-39) 500,000? (Chinese civilians) – Jonas Savimbi (Angola, 1975-2002) 400,000 – Mullah Omar – Taliban (Afghanistan, 1986-2001) 400,000 – Idi Amin (Uganda, 1969-1979) 300,000 – Yahya Khan (Pakistan, 1970-71) 300,000 (Bangladesh) – Benito Mussolini (Ethiopia, 1936; Libya, 1934-45; Yugoslavia, WWII) 300,000 – Mobutu Sese Seko (Zaire, 1965-97) ? = Charles Taylor (Liberia, 1989-1996) 220,000

  • Traveling from the ecotopian culture, through the breadbasket culture to the fou

    Traveling from the ecotopian culture, through the breadbasket culture to the foundry culture it is painfully obvious that the only declining culture in north america is the foundry sub civilization that was built around the great lakes and Erie canal in order to supply goods for the western expansion and rapid immigration that was made possible and then necessary by the Louisiana purchase.

    The civil war was fought over which economy and culture would profit from westward expansion. And the success if the propagandists to define the war as over slavery or unity is exceeded only by the propaganda that Germany started the first world war.

    We should never have ceded from England nor stopped the south from doing so. The end of the west is not started by the French revolution as much as the american.

    economics tells us the incentives and the incentives tell us the truth. Words are too often used as deception to mask a fraud.

    In history the French are always wrong – reveling in their creativity at corruption , the English a but less so because of their empiricism, and the Germans right about everything because it fell to them to keep the east at bay, but demonized for their discipline and treated as rubes — a convenient propaganda measure to hide the dependence that France and England relied upon for their freedoms.

    How is that for casual analysis? 😉

    Everything is related to everything across a ling enough time span.

    Our vanities have consequences. Because small things in large numbers have vast consequences.

    Source date (UTC): 2011-12-24 11:13:00 UTC

  • DON’T HAVE TO WEAPONIZE IT. THE BIRDS ARE DOING THAT FOR US” I had the nasty flu

    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/alarm-as-dutch-lab-creates-highly-contagious-killer-flu-6279474.html”WE DON’T HAVE TO WEAPONIZE IT. THE BIRDS ARE DOING THAT FOR US”

    I had the nasty flu that killed so many people back in 1977, and my health has never fully recovered. I don’t know if the conspiracy nuts are right or wrong in suggesting that the Swine Flu escaped the lab. But either way it wasn’t very fun.

    I also got the flu that killed a few hundred people in Europe in the winter of 1996-1997. (It made for an interesting vacation. I soldiered onward anyway. I lost 25 pounds because of it.)

    H5N1 (the bird flu) only has an R0 (reproductive rate) of 1.14+. But it had a 60% mortality rate. (They call it ‘morbidity rate’ in the literature.) The relatively low rate of transmission was due to the fact that you had to be in pretty close contact to get it. I’ve seen a few other studies where the measured reproductive rate reached over 2.0 (although they were smaller samples.) The common flu we get every year seems to come in at around 2.

    But these researchers have bred an aerosol variant (one that can be spread by sneezing for example). And sure, the really scary diseases have R0’s of 5 to 15. But let’s just say that that we go from 1.14 to 1.6, to something like 2.2 to 4.

    I mean, Soderberg’s movie is scary enough as it is.

    Source date (UTC): 2011-12-19 21:02:00 UTC

  • CRASH I’d originally predicted that the China bubble would pop over Christmas of

    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/opinion/krugman-will-china-break.htmlCHINA CRASH

    I’d originally predicted that the China bubble would pop over Christmas of 2010 — a year ago now — based upon the relationship between prices, inventory and incomes. I’m not sure I was wrong about when it popped, even if it’s taking a long time to become visible. But It’s certainly happening right now. In 50 of 70 Cities prices are in free fall. What I don’t know, is how their economy will ‘recalculate’ prices and actions. Totalitarians are great at spending money, but now people are schooled, trained, invested, and habituated to a future that can’t exist. Recalculating a new future is going to be expensive and likely painful for them, as much as it has been for us.

    2012 will be a very, very, interesting year. It’s the 1870’s and the 1930’s all over again. And we’re finally seeing the big guns in economics calling this a DEPRESSION. Finally.

    Source date (UTC): 2011-12-19 08:58:00 UTC

  • Keynesian Absurd Optimism

    From Modeled Behavior

    The desire of the expanders to expand is always exponential. In the end you only need one of them and they will attempt to take over the entire economy. What’s stops them is competition, scarce real resources and financing. Thus if you are in a world where no one else is looking to expand, and real resources are slack, financing is all that’s holding one of these folks back. Practically speaking the price of slack resources also matters because if they actually collapsed in price then at some point you could simply self-finance your empire. But, there is never a shortage of empire builders. There is only a shortage of people willing to lend to empire builders.

    Well, first lets understand that it is entirely possible to saturate all opportunity within any economy unless there is some sort of asymmetry of either resources, information, or technology. The typical keynesian assumption is that we will continue to discover opportunities by the application of technology. And that we can keep doing so forever. I’ll have to answer that obviously historical falsehood in a later posting. But the choice sentence elsewhere in the article was this one:

    “If people genuinely couldn’t find good ways to employ resources then everyone would get poorer but as long as financing is available there need be no recession.”

    That’s the whole point now, isn’t it? Are you sure you understand the implications of that sentence? I don’t think so. Whenever one group of people (a) flocks to an opportunity in significant numbers that they deny access to another group of people (b), the group (b) will work against the interests of group (a) in order to gain their own opportunity. If you view society as a collective consisting of a community of common interests, then perhaps you might favor your progressive bias. However, if you see society as consisting of groups engaged in perpetual and unrelenting class and cultural warfare over the distribution and means of obtaining status and opportunity — where each group uses the state to apply coercion against other sects, then one would develop an entirely different conclusion. Furthermore, if you view yourself as a minority competing with foreign groups, then you would increase your bias in favor group persistence. And from that position, you would see people who ally with the state as your competitors, not members of your community. You (Keynesians) assume the state is a benefit, and apply a methodology that confirms that the state is a benefit, because it serves to confirm your bias. But that benefit is working AGAINST as many preferences as it is in FAVOR of it. Because we have no community of common interest. There is no community of common interest in an empire. The meaning of empire is precisely that people do not share common interests. Small homogenous states are egalitarian because of the status economy – which determines access to mates, people, and opportunity. The status economy is also the natural accounting system of many. People value money and culture, morals,ethics and manners, (that set of forgone opportunity costs we all pay in each moment of our day) as well as different I don’t think you grasp the importance of the fact that almost all decisions consist of far more than prices. In fact, at any given point, market prices are only one factor in any transaction. People actively seek circumstances where they can avoid price consideration – either to demonstrate their status, or to gain human attention, or to simply avoid existing in the monetary economy. In complex decisions, all sorts of different biases are ‘funded’ by choices between one provider of goods and another whenever prices are not marginally different. Assuming all prices are equal for a particular good or service, people generally do business with those people with whom they can exchange status signals, or options on future discounts due to loyalty. It’s not that you’re mistaken in your understanding of the monetary models, or the benefit of monetary policy. It’s that you’re not accounting for the friction in that model that is determined by the signaling economy. And that friction can approach the infinite whenever you do not have a homogenous society. And if you have a homogenous society, you then need a common currency. Because a currency is the means of shared investment, risk and reward among a people with a set of common interests. (Homogenous: meaning the shared mythology, the shared methods of signaling within the methodology, the shared definitions of property, the shared methods of paying for the informal institutions that perpetuate those property definitions: manners, ethics, and morals, the shared institutions for resolving conflicts over the transfer of property, and the shared institutions for concentrating and applying capital toward shared ends. All of which is bounded by the complexity of the division of labor in in turn which is determined by the percentage of the population with an of IQ over 105.) 🙂 Curt