Curt Doolittle

Theme: Incentives

  • On Unions

    ON UNIONS The unions made common mistakes of overreach. They began with the moral: safety, liability, minimum wages, profit sharing, and replacing with cheaper workers (arbitrage). But then proceeded with overreaches that varied from moral hazard: demands for impossible future claims: continuous increases and pensions; then to the immoral: mandatory membership, mandatory fees, and fostering endemic corruption; then to the violation of natural law: interfering in the political process. It’s a shock to capitalists and free marketers raised on the myth of constant growth made possible under the agrarian and industrial (hydrocarbon) eras, and prohibiting temporal labor arbitrage is perhaps hard for the layman to understand when it occurs across decades of time rather than across national borders, but men are not commodities and their marketability declines rapidly after choice of first opportunity – and seizing all the ‘best’ time at the lowest price under promise of future rewards is merely an act of fraud. So it is all too easy to socialize uncompetitiveness and privatize commons into the hands of investors and capitalists. Most capitalists cannot compete under free trade because profits would be much smaller. Contrary to libertarian dogma, and contrary to anglo bourgeois values, while the puritan/manorial work ethic is an unquestionable good, and while rule of law assisting in capital concentration and formation is an unquestionable good, as a good Propertarian we query ‘But what are the limits of that good? Because there exist no unlimited theories and therefore no unlimited goods.’ And we find that it is possible to socialize losses and privatize gains if we do not perform full accounting. And a full accounting only ends when we have reduced all accounts to ‘time’. Because it is ‘time’ that is the currency we trade.

  • On Unions

    ON UNIONS The unions made common mistakes of overreach. They began with the moral: safety, liability, minimum wages, profit sharing, and replacing with cheaper workers (arbitrage). But then proceeded with overreaches that varied from moral hazard: demands for impossible future claims: continuous increases and pensions; then to the immoral: mandatory membership, mandatory fees, and fostering endemic corruption; then to the violation of natural law: interfering in the political process. It’s a shock to capitalists and free marketers raised on the myth of constant growth made possible under the agrarian and industrial (hydrocarbon) eras, and prohibiting temporal labor arbitrage is perhaps hard for the layman to understand when it occurs across decades of time rather than across national borders, but men are not commodities and their marketability declines rapidly after choice of first opportunity – and seizing all the ‘best’ time at the lowest price under promise of future rewards is merely an act of fraud. So it is all too easy to socialize uncompetitiveness and privatize commons into the hands of investors and capitalists. Most capitalists cannot compete under free trade because profits would be much smaller. Contrary to libertarian dogma, and contrary to anglo bourgeois values, while the puritan/manorial work ethic is an unquestionable good, and while rule of law assisting in capital concentration and formation is an unquestionable good, as a good Propertarian we query ‘But what are the limits of that good? Because there exist no unlimited theories and therefore no unlimited goods.’ And we find that it is possible to socialize losses and privatize gains if we do not perform full accounting. And a full accounting only ends when we have reduced all accounts to ‘time’. Because it is ‘time’ that is the currency we trade.

  • Understanding Accounting and Finance? Get Back To Lender Beware.

    Mar 01, 2017 2:40pm UNDERSTANDING ACCOUNTING AND FINANCE I’ve been told all my life by some asshole or other that I don’t understand accounting or finance. And I always found that humorous. I took the same classes as everyone else. I just learned something very different from them: most of it is used to lie under pseudoscientific pretense caused entirely by the necessity of limiting profitability in order to reduce taxation, complying with government regulation that obscures real costs of doing business, and complying with bank lending requirements that force you to claim regularity to your income that does not exist, forcing you to keep Operational P&L to run a business, Credit P&L to borrow money, Tax P&L to pay taxes, and Investor P&L to estimate upside. But given the archaic and pseudoscientific nature of accounting and finance and that super-pseudoscience we call mainstream macro economics, all of these things are falsehoods that address special cases. The value of a business is one of three things: the current liquidation value in the event of closure, the value of the business as a going concern to a competitor in the market, and the value to some sucker you can find who will pay you more than either of those numbers. What it is expressly NOT is whatever nonsense your bank, or the government says that it is. Every time I hear the value of a company is expressed in market cap I wanna put irons on someone and stick them in a cell. Suckers exist in america in large numbers principally because we just create so many of them, and we hold so few punishments for them, that the legal and financial industry largely seems to exist in order to allow and profit from, sucker- plays. Now sure, you might be lucky and get a Peter Theil or one of the other Paypal Mafia to invest in your company. These are entrepreneurs who happen to have turned to entrepreneurship at scale. They are not engaged in financialization which provides them with gains whether you win or lose. But that is exactly how most of the capitalist class functions. We need to get back to lender beware.

  • Understanding Accounting and Finance? Get Back To Lender Beware.

    Mar 01, 2017 2:40pm UNDERSTANDING ACCOUNTING AND FINANCE I’ve been told all my life by some asshole or other that I don’t understand accounting or finance. And I always found that humorous. I took the same classes as everyone else. I just learned something very different from them: most of it is used to lie under pseudoscientific pretense caused entirely by the necessity of limiting profitability in order to reduce taxation, complying with government regulation that obscures real costs of doing business, and complying with bank lending requirements that force you to claim regularity to your income that does not exist, forcing you to keep Operational P&L to run a business, Credit P&L to borrow money, Tax P&L to pay taxes, and Investor P&L to estimate upside. But given the archaic and pseudoscientific nature of accounting and finance and that super-pseudoscience we call mainstream macro economics, all of these things are falsehoods that address special cases. The value of a business is one of three things: the current liquidation value in the event of closure, the value of the business as a going concern to a competitor in the market, and the value to some sucker you can find who will pay you more than either of those numbers. What it is expressly NOT is whatever nonsense your bank, or the government says that it is. Every time I hear the value of a company is expressed in market cap I wanna put irons on someone and stick them in a cell. Suckers exist in america in large numbers principally because we just create so many of them, and we hold so few punishments for them, that the legal and financial industry largely seems to exist in order to allow and profit from, sucker- plays. Now sure, you might be lucky and get a Peter Theil or one of the other Paypal Mafia to invest in your company. These are entrepreneurs who happen to have turned to entrepreneurship at scale. They are not engaged in financialization which provides them with gains whether you win or lose. But that is exactly how most of the capitalist class functions. We need to get back to lender beware.

  • I Justify Markets – In Everything.

    I justify markets in everything. Markets in everything requires natural law, and natural law requires aristocracy. Aristocracy like violence is neither good nor bad. It is the ends that aristocracy and violence are put to that determine good or bad. As such, advocacy of markets (reciprocity/cooperation/non-aggression) merely requires aristocracy as a cost (Input). I remain a ‘libertarian’ in the sense that I desire liberty and freedom even if I can only obtain it through purchasing sovereignty with the promise of violence. But it is a condition of sovereignty for the aristocracy, liberty for the upper, freedom for the middle and working, and subsidy for the dependent classes that I am seeking to justify. And I can find no other political argument that survives tests of scale (time).

  • I Justify Markets – In Everything.

    I justify markets in everything. Markets in everything requires natural law, and natural law requires aristocracy. Aristocracy like violence is neither good nor bad. It is the ends that aristocracy and violence are put to that determine good or bad. As such, advocacy of markets (reciprocity/cooperation/non-aggression) merely requires aristocracy as a cost (Input). I remain a ‘libertarian’ in the sense that I desire liberty and freedom even if I can only obtain it through purchasing sovereignty with the promise of violence. But it is a condition of sovereignty for the aristocracy, liberty for the upper, freedom for the middle and working, and subsidy for the dependent classes that I am seeking to justify. And I can find no other political argument that survives tests of scale (time).

  • TRUMP’S STRATEGY: NEGOTIATE FROM A POSITION OF MISTRUST, AND MAINTAIN WALK AWAY

    TRUMP’S STRATEGY: NEGOTIATE FROM A POSITION OF MISTRUST, AND MAINTAIN WALK AWAY POWER., CAUSING YOUR OPPONENTS TO CREATIVELY NEGOTIATE ON THE DEFENSE.

    He uses this strategy all the time. He did it throughout his career. He did it through the campaign. He did it prior to taking office. And he has continued to do it since taking office.

    1) ACT STUPID (OR PARANOID): “Say what the base thinks, and cause the state bureaucracy, media, public intellectuals, and academy, to justify its position thereby educating the people.”

    He has been doing this to the media and they do his bidding. It is how he obtained free press. It is how they are under his control today.

    In this way he talks to his base, who understands exactly what he is doing, and avoids putting the opponents in control of the discourse.

    As long as his base will repeat what he says the opposition will remain on the defensive.

    I think most people forget that he wrote a book on the art of the deal. Trump forgot more about negotiation in the past hour than most people on earth will ever know.

    I’m not the only person who has been putting this explanation forward – dozens of others have. It’s obvious. It’s just not obvious to the solipsistic left. People who speak in emotion today not consequence in the future.

    2) USE HYPERBOLE (The Kantian Categorical Imperative):

    One of the other techniques he makes use of is that conservatives speak in hyperbole in order to accentuate the conservative intuition to treat all moral statements under the Kantian Categorical Imperative.

    What is it? Conservatives always ask themselves, subconsciously: “What if everyone did that, or what would be the consequences of a lot of this happening?” (The intuition of the conservative time preference).

    3) ACT DECISIVELY ACCORDING WHAT THEY EXPECT: ACTING STUPID.

    This technique results in forcing all other parties to use creative means of preventing that EXTREME (which you never intend), and will come to the table with either an admission of failure so that you can move on.

    In other words, it is a means of exporting cost and blame by forcing others to do work defensively. This produces the least posturing, less deceitful, most detailed explanatory responses by others, and it leaves responsibility for failure at their feet. Your hands are clean.

    4) SIEZE OPPORTUNITY FOR SUCCESS, WHILE DEMONSTRATING HOW DISHONEST AND MANIPULATIVE AND UNTRUSTWORTHY YOUR OPPONENTS ARE.

    Now from personal experience, this requires some acting skill, but all it really requires is ‘keeping your finger on the pulse of your workers’ and using whatever concerns they have (which are far more paranoid and creative than you can ever imagine being) against your opponents’.

    Trump is a MASTER OF THE DEAL. Not of testimony, not of fully informed, consent, but of negotiation and the deal.

    Basically, force people to make you happy, but never admit to being satisfied. Then anyone who was at all honest and helpful, heap praise upon, and make sure gets access to future opportunities.

    THE IGNORANCE OF THE TALKING HEAD CLASS

    People who babble, advocate, politic, and criticize for a living rarely if EVER have had any responsibility for anything other than themselves. Those who manage the incomes of many families, tens, hundreds or thousands; those who manage the money of investors; those who manage the political demands of millions; all have responsibility as long as they can fail. Unfortunately, politicians can’t really fail because – while we could – we don’t measure them the way we measure business, industry, and finance.

    When you fight in business you fight, and when you fight in business in ‘the trades’ you’re dealing with very small margins, and very ‘creative’ means of error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, fictionalism, and outright deceit.

    NEGOTIATION AS PROXY WARFARE

    Imagine (you probably can’t) what it is like to negotiate with Yassir Arafat, any given president of Iran, any given member of the Russia duma, or any given Chinese official. In these countries DECEPTION is not only an art, but it is HONORABLE. In the case of Chinese it is simply good manners to lie in most circumstances.

    Trump uses very well understood negotiating techniques. They have names. People teach them. You can hire people to use them for you. Most of us cannot grasp the art of negotiation with enemies, competitors, and frenemies. (Foreign Governments, Domestic Politicians, Bureaucrats, Unions, Financiers, Construction, Garbage Disposal, Maintenance, Housekeeping, and Utility companies.)

    Imagine what it is to negotiate with rooms full of lawyers trying to seek advantage through contractual nuance (deceit). (You wouldn’t believe what I have heard from the top firms in the USA like Wilson Sonsini – ‘Here is how to screw your common shareholders….’, and “here is how we’re going to help the other side screw you”. Or what I have heard from the Clinton Foundation (which I won’t repeat here).

    (Conversely, FWIW, the CIA (er…State Department) never lied to me … ever. They only say “I can’t discuss those topics.) And my (limited) experience in the Justice Department was that everyone is lying all the time, and at every opportunity, and doing as little as possible, taking as much vacation time, and politicking for another position. Conversely the Postal Inspectors were about as straight up and honest as you can get.)

    Trump has vast experience with ‘the unskilled laboring classes’, ‘the semi-skilled working classes’, and the ‘the skilled classes’, the ‘managerial classes’, the ‘professional classes’, and the bureaucratic classes. He has build his career negotiating with people in an industry (construction) where corruption is rife at political, government, union, and contract or level, and where profits and losses are often determined in by the resolution of conflicts over prices and responsibility in courts, and where everyone is greedy and trying to get a dime out of everyone else.

    Unfortunately, college educated yet ignorant and questionably intelligent america, and the ‘talkers’ generally lack any responsibility for people, money, and tangible results of any scale, and have lost all cognition of what it’s like to do this kind of ‘real work’. The kind of work his BASE does every single day.

    HE’S DOING WHAT THE WORKING AND PRODUCING PUBLIC WANT, AND WHAT CONSERVATIVE INTELLECTUALS (LIKE ME) WANT.

    As someone who has spent a few decades now working on performative truth (and what we refer to as the scientific method), I think many of us in the population are desirous of putting the shoe on the other public intellectuals foot so to speak, and therefore changing the strategy to where we actively interrogate the state, academy, and media. If for no other reason than the misuse of statistics, and the misrepresentation of nearly all ‘research’ in anthropology, economics, the social sciences, and psychology.

    Even within that discipline of economics, I find it trivially easy to demonstrate that almost every measure we can find constitutes cherrypicking and does not fully account for the changes in various forms of capital, and the cost of doing so. Isn’t economics of growth de-facto cherrypicking?

    Anyway. On behalf of the public I prefer that politicians prosecute the academy state and media. Because those of us out here in the fields (tiny think tanks included) are clearly not able to do so in sufficient numbers.

    Cheers.

    ( Note: I made a living by buying, reforming, consolidating, and selling companies. I have used this strategy for decades at admittedly smaller scales. And I have a more ‘ruthless’ reputation than Trump does – at my infinitely smaller scale of operations. )

    Source date (UTC): 2017-03-22 14:59:00 UTC

  • The Incentives of Leftist Parasites

    By Eli Harman Why are leftists and social justice warriors so immune to facts, logic, and arguments? It’s because social justice warriors are lying, parasitic, pieces of shit. The aim of lying about equality, is to force transfers and redistribution from the more equal, to the less, including the extension of trust, that will be abused, and the extension of opportunity, which will not be fully realized. All of this is costly, so it represents a parasitic burden on the people forced to provide it. The assumption of that burden, and its maintenance, are compelled and enforced by shaming, scolding, nagging, gossip, rallying, all the “feminine means of coercion,” all the tools of moral, social, and economic, ostracism that can be mustered and deployed to raise the cost of disagreement or dissent rather than address the points of contention in good faith. But because this wholesale plunder and parasitism through fraud creates great boons for its beneficiaries, and salves their fragile egos, they will fight tooth and nail to protect it. And on account of the proceeds of this parasitic plunder and fraud, reliable pawns for leftist elites are bought and paid for; the lynch pin of their demographic and democratic dominance; which they are not willing and not able to maintain by keeping pace with conservatives reproductively. There are nearly insoluable conflicts of interests here that can only be resolved, at the very least, by the physical removal of millions, and the vigorous, violent, and proactive production and supply of incentives, against engaging in dysgenic parasitism, plunder, and fraud. Otherwise it’s too profitable. It will be done. And the more it is done, and the longer it is done, the costlier it will be either to continue, or to stop; for the cost of either can only ever grow, until the final reckoning, and the final toll is paid (whichever way it is paid…)

  • The Incentives of Leftist Parasites

    By Eli Harman Why are leftists and social justice warriors so immune to facts, logic, and arguments? It’s because social justice warriors are lying, parasitic, pieces of shit. The aim of lying about equality, is to force transfers and redistribution from the more equal, to the less, including the extension of trust, that will be abused, and the extension of opportunity, which will not be fully realized. All of this is costly, so it represents a parasitic burden on the people forced to provide it. The assumption of that burden, and its maintenance, are compelled and enforced by shaming, scolding, nagging, gossip, rallying, all the “feminine means of coercion,” all the tools of moral, social, and economic, ostracism that can be mustered and deployed to raise the cost of disagreement or dissent rather than address the points of contention in good faith. But because this wholesale plunder and parasitism through fraud creates great boons for its beneficiaries, and salves their fragile egos, they will fight tooth and nail to protect it. And on account of the proceeds of this parasitic plunder and fraud, reliable pawns for leftist elites are bought and paid for; the lynch pin of their demographic and democratic dominance; which they are not willing and not able to maintain by keeping pace with conservatives reproductively. There are nearly insoluable conflicts of interests here that can only be resolved, at the very least, by the physical removal of millions, and the vigorous, violent, and proactive production and supply of incentives, against engaging in dysgenic parasitism, plunder, and fraud. Otherwise it’s too profitable. It will be done. And the more it is done, and the longer it is done, the costlier it will be either to continue, or to stop; for the cost of either can only ever grow, until the final reckoning, and the final toll is paid (whichever way it is paid…)

  • The Law of Conservation of Costs

    by John Dow Much like thermodynamics – where energy cannot be created or destroyed merely transformed – in economics, cost cannot be created or destroyed, merely transferred. The Government offsets limited liability with the cost it bares to establish the sovereignty with which it can limit liability. Without a Sovereign Insurer, businesses which impose damages on other parties would likely face retaliation unless they compensate for their damages. The Sovereign supresses this retaliation with superior force, yet it spares the party upon whom damages have been imposed the cost of retaliation by also insuring them against these damages, albeit within limits. Violence is just another form of labour, and a costly one at that. Just as labour has a price, so does violence. If you don’t like it, take up arms and revolt against the Government, if you can afford it.