Curt Doolittle

Theme: Incentives

  • People are rational. Choosing to ‘be good’ is in many people’s interest – at lea

    People are rational.

    Choosing to ‘be good’ is in many people’s interest – at least in the long term.

    But choosing to ‘be bad’ is in many other people’s interest – at least in the short term.

    The principle problem in expanding the size of the good, is that each individual who chooses to be bad has greater influence upon others’ ability to choose to be good, than each individual who chooses to be good has influence upon those who choose to be bad.

    In other words, roughly speaking, every person at the bottom is six times as costly as the benefits created by every person at the top. For the simple reason that discouragement, gossip, threat and failure spread fear of risk faster and farther than encouragement, compliment, opportunity and success.

    There is nothing to be done about human nature.

    All we can do is make it very difficult to be bad.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-01-09 10:38:00 UTC

  • “A rise in average human satisfaction is the greatest threat to the world econom

    —“A rise in average human satisfaction is the greatest threat to the world economy. Thus, Stoicism is probably the single most dangerous idea to the current world order.”— Julian le Roux

    Genius

    Source date (UTC): 2017-01-07 20:25:00 UTC

  • MIXED AND UNMIXED ECONOMIES? 0) lets look at these terms: COMMUNISM: unorganized

    MIXED AND UNMIXED ECONOMIES?

    0) lets look at these terms:

    COMMUNISM: unorganized equalitarian production of private and commons. Collective ownership of the means of production.

    (PARASITISM UPON THE INDIVIDUAL)

    SOCIALISM: state (involuntary) organization of production. State ownerhship of the means of production. state ownership of the proceeds of production. state distribution of the proceeds of production to common or private ends.

    (INVOLUNTARY COMMONS)

    SOCIAL DEMOCRACY: state organization of some part of production. State ownership of the MEANS of production, state ownership of the PROCEEDS of production. Individual retains COMMISSION on his production for his private consumption, the remainder is held by the state for the production of commons.

    (COMPETITION FOR PRIVATE AND COMMONS)

    CLASSICAL LIBERALISM: individual ownership of the means of production, individual ownership of the proceeds of production. The voluntary organization of production. individuals contribute to the production of commons by majority assent.

    (VOLUNTARY COMMONS)

    CAPITALISM (market anarchism). Individual ownership of the means of production, individual ownership of the proceeds of production, the voluntary organization of production, and the private construction of common goods.

    (PARASITISM UPON THE COMMONS)

    1) EXTREMES FAIL

    Neither socialism nor capitalism is possible. Hence neither exists.

    2) MONOPOLIES FAIL:

    Instead we develop mixed economies.

    Social democracy (mixed economies) are the constant throughout history. At present the mainstream seeks to identify the maximum taxation possible without disincentivizing production. This appears to be dependent upon the homogeneity of the population.

    3) MIXED WORK, BUT MORE MIXING IS BETTER

    We appear to need a different economic model for each CLASS.

    … Lets look at the hierarchy of labor:

    – barbarian (outside the system – person is candidate or enemy)

    – prisoner (owner bears risk but person is disposable)

    – slave/soldiery (owner bears risk – person is tradable/releasable)

    – serf (split cost of risk) (supported by own production)

    – employee (full cost of risk) (supported by production returns)

    – professional (burgher) (supported by trade returns)

    – capitalist (landowner) (supported by management returns)

    – statist (aristocracy) (supported by proceeds of taxation)

    – warriors (aristocracy) (supported by proceeds of conquest)

    So we do not have ENOUGH of a mixed economy.

    We have no slavery, too small a military, no regiments, too small a disaster releif organization, no commons- maintenance organizations, too few syndicates and unions, and no monasteries or nunneries, and the academy functions as the only monastery. Yet we have a bloated financial sector that is clearly parasitic.

    Why? Because we allowed collective bargaining, and parasitic private and public contracts to award pensions we could not afford at our rates of inflation.

    We have created the worst possible mix of large homes and small expensive urban apartments, rather than large family apartments in large numbers in urban areas.

    We have created an empire with constant political conflict in order to gain mobility, rather than a collection of small homogenous states with constant political satisfaction of local demands, at the expense of mobility. However, that mobility is the reason for the decline of social order and the fmaily and care for the commons, and our culture itself.

    Economists are even WORSE idiots than theologians.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev,Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2017-01-03 13:03:00 UTC

  • “All of civilization in every society consists of nothing but insurance. Sociali

    —“All of civilization in every society consists of nothing but insurance. Socialism and welfare statism take profits from risk and investment in the future and use it in the present. The longer it goes on the more likely society collapses from overconsumption and malinvestment, and the less likely we are to make real progress or to innovate and evolve and expand (including, now, beyond Earth.)”—Delian Valeriani

    Source date (UTC): 2017-01-02 23:13:00 UTC

  • 1) Insurers, not government provide superior regulation because insurers are pai

    1) Insurers, not government provide superior regulation because insurers are paid directly to understand what it is that they insure. Government acts as an insurer of last resort – governing the insurers, not the innovators. It’s the middleman-insurer that specializes in the technology, whereas the government merely specializes in fraud and crime prevention by regulating the insurer.

    2) The market is far better than our imaginations at both discoveries, finding opportunities to make use of them, finding means of immorally benefitting from them, and finding means of regulating them. As long as the market, the innovator, the insurer, and the government all do their jobs, we do not need to envision so much as react.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-01-02 11:46:00 UTC

  • Apple Will Have No Choice…

    Chris, Great unbiased Venturebeat article on Apple. Thank you. Have a few thoughts to share (and curious if you have any feedback). As someone intimately familiar with the Post-Bill-Gates internal consequences at Microsoft, I see all the same behaviors at Apple, and I suspect we will see the same ‘lost decade’ of results. The difference is, Apple does not benefit from the network effect of entrenched products as did Microsoft, and Apple’s fall will be more rapid and their time to adapt much shorter. Over the past six years I’ve suggested that Apple will continue to bet on the consumer and fail – because (a)the accumulated media of the past century is now widely distributed, and (b) the touch-screen revolution that propelled Apple’s iPhone revenues is widely distributed, and (c) everyone in the world is researching the verbal-AI revolution since they’re aware that’s the next interface hurdle, and (d) the Bauhaus design ethic is firmly entrenched worldwide. And so there are no ‘failures of engineering and design’ among device manufacturers that Apple can compensate for, and use to obtain large consumer market share as both Apple and Microsoft had done during their evolutions. We tend to think of Apple and Microsoft as innovators, but they were merely consumer commoditizers of existing technologies during an era of pent up demand. This condition no longer exists in the world – just the opposite. Industrial design for consumer users has been adopted everywhere in the mainstream. So, as far as I can see, Apple has no choice of means of maintaining share price other than pivoting to business and industry, and displacing Microsoft – who, for cultural reasons, is the software equivalent of IBM/DEC/WANG in the industrial space, and Motorola/Nokia in the mobile phone space. Yet as (a) the merger of iOS and Mac OS groups (another mistake we saw Microsoft make in the pursuit of false operating system efficiencies) and as (b) the abandonment of the power-user market with the new ‘Mac Air’ rebranded as ‘Mac Pro’ and the termination of the mac pro line (c) the abandonment of network/backup devices (d) the continuous abandonment of the professional market (video editing), (e) the abandonment of the ‘maintainable’ mac server hardware (f) the abandonment of the mac server software community (g) the failure of Apple to produce competitive cloud services — all of which indicate Apple is either gambling on an other miracle-research-and-development effort (historically a terrible tragedy), Now, perhaps I’ve been studying business and industry transformation for too many decades, but it would seem far more prudent to maintain a portfolio and CREATE a network effect as a resistance to unpredictable innovation by a wildcard competitor, and to continue the trend of making industrial engineering innovations usable by consumers and power users, than it would be to continue to put all one’s eggs in a consumer basket when consumers are fickle and industry allows you to create an entrenched revenue stream. Microsoft repeatedly pursued false efficiency instead of creating separate units that pursued the interests of different users. And when they did so they still caused havoc: attempting to move users to the xbox platform instead of preserving the ‘elite’ gamer on the PC and the ‘casual’ gamer on the xbox. There are no efficiencies. There are only lost opportunities. Microsoft also abandoned their evangelists, abandoned their dominance as an application platform, and they are currently in the process of abandoning the .net stack that they tried to use to create a walled garden. And on a broader horizon, given the influence the ‘new age’ companies have on the stock market and as a consequence the economy (FB/email-fax, Google/YellowPages, Apple/AT&T-Communications) we are living in the most fragile economy since the end of the roaring twenties. Why? Because quite a few of us know how to displace Facebook, google, apple and Microsoft. And of those only Microsoft retains a durable network effect. And the only company currently capable of eroding the Microsoft network effect is Apple – because their products are simply better in every regard. The only think preventing Apple from displacing Microsoft’s revenues is the acquisition of and incorporation of a virtualization product and thereby achieving for Apple with Microsoft achieved because of IBM/DEC. THE SKYSCRAPER THEORY OF ECONOMICS Just as a bit of humor: there is a correlation between the launch of a tallest building and a market crash. Meaning that any economic conditions allowing for a new tallest building are indicators of an economy that will bust. I recognize the same effect in Apple’s spaceship office. The fact that anyone would do that, is an indicator of a bubble that will bust. APPLE REDIRECTION I suppose that the function of those of us who are students and teachers of business cycles can ‘help’ Apple by writing about it quite a bit. And pushing ideas into the public discourse that are culturally suppressed internally. But I suspect that the damage that will be done to Apple by the first five years post-Steve will be so significant that (like Microsoft) it may not be possible to correct it. Company cultures function analogously to an instruction set, and companies can only calculate what instructions are culturally available. Apple (like google and FB) have cultures (as did MSFT) that enshrine values that gave rise to them and were mythical at the time – and are now simply false. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine. obrien@venturebeat.com http://venturebeat.com/…/apple-survived-a-horrible-2016-an…/

  • Apple Will Have No Choice…

    Chris, Great unbiased Venturebeat article on Apple. Thank you. Have a few thoughts to share (and curious if you have any feedback). As someone intimately familiar with the Post-Bill-Gates internal consequences at Microsoft, I see all the same behaviors at Apple, and I suspect we will see the same ‘lost decade’ of results. The difference is, Apple does not benefit from the network effect of entrenched products as did Microsoft, and Apple’s fall will be more rapid and their time to adapt much shorter. Over the past six years I’ve suggested that Apple will continue to bet on the consumer and fail – because (a)the accumulated media of the past century is now widely distributed, and (b) the touch-screen revolution that propelled Apple’s iPhone revenues is widely distributed, and (c) everyone in the world is researching the verbal-AI revolution since they’re aware that’s the next interface hurdle, and (d) the Bauhaus design ethic is firmly entrenched worldwide. And so there are no ‘failures of engineering and design’ among device manufacturers that Apple can compensate for, and use to obtain large consumer market share as both Apple and Microsoft had done during their evolutions. We tend to think of Apple and Microsoft as innovators, but they were merely consumer commoditizers of existing technologies during an era of pent up demand. This condition no longer exists in the world – just the opposite. Industrial design for consumer users has been adopted everywhere in the mainstream. So, as far as I can see, Apple has no choice of means of maintaining share price other than pivoting to business and industry, and displacing Microsoft – who, for cultural reasons, is the software equivalent of IBM/DEC/WANG in the industrial space, and Motorola/Nokia in the mobile phone space. Yet as (a) the merger of iOS and Mac OS groups (another mistake we saw Microsoft make in the pursuit of false operating system efficiencies) and as (b) the abandonment of the power-user market with the new ‘Mac Air’ rebranded as ‘Mac Pro’ and the termination of the mac pro line (c) the abandonment of network/backup devices (d) the continuous abandonment of the professional market (video editing), (e) the abandonment of the ‘maintainable’ mac server hardware (f) the abandonment of the mac server software community (g) the failure of Apple to produce competitive cloud services — all of which indicate Apple is either gambling on an other miracle-research-and-development effort (historically a terrible tragedy), Now, perhaps I’ve been studying business and industry transformation for too many decades, but it would seem far more prudent to maintain a portfolio and CREATE a network effect as a resistance to unpredictable innovation by a wildcard competitor, and to continue the trend of making industrial engineering innovations usable by consumers and power users, than it would be to continue to put all one’s eggs in a consumer basket when consumers are fickle and industry allows you to create an entrenched revenue stream. Microsoft repeatedly pursued false efficiency instead of creating separate units that pursued the interests of different users. And when they did so they still caused havoc: attempting to move users to the xbox platform instead of preserving the ‘elite’ gamer on the PC and the ‘casual’ gamer on the xbox. There are no efficiencies. There are only lost opportunities. Microsoft also abandoned their evangelists, abandoned their dominance as an application platform, and they are currently in the process of abandoning the .net stack that they tried to use to create a walled garden. And on a broader horizon, given the influence the ‘new age’ companies have on the stock market and as a consequence the economy (FB/email-fax, Google/YellowPages, Apple/AT&T-Communications) we are living in the most fragile economy since the end of the roaring twenties. Why? Because quite a few of us know how to displace Facebook, google, apple and Microsoft. And of those only Microsoft retains a durable network effect. And the only company currently capable of eroding the Microsoft network effect is Apple – because their products are simply better in every regard. The only think preventing Apple from displacing Microsoft’s revenues is the acquisition of and incorporation of a virtualization product and thereby achieving for Apple with Microsoft achieved because of IBM/DEC. THE SKYSCRAPER THEORY OF ECONOMICS Just as a bit of humor: there is a correlation between the launch of a tallest building and a market crash. Meaning that any economic conditions allowing for a new tallest building are indicators of an economy that will bust. I recognize the same effect in Apple’s spaceship office. The fact that anyone would do that, is an indicator of a bubble that will bust. APPLE REDIRECTION I suppose that the function of those of us who are students and teachers of business cycles can ‘help’ Apple by writing about it quite a bit. And pushing ideas into the public discourse that are culturally suppressed internally. But I suspect that the damage that will be done to Apple by the first five years post-Steve will be so significant that (like Microsoft) it may not be possible to correct it. Company cultures function analogously to an instruction set, and companies can only calculate what instructions are culturally available. Apple (like google and FB) have cultures (as did MSFT) that enshrine values that gave rise to them and were mythical at the time – and are now simply false. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine. obrien@venturebeat.com http://venturebeat.com/…/apple-survived-a-horrible-2016-an…/

  • ECONOMICS OF SEX (not sure who shared this with me again yesterday, but even tho

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToS4zoYcJnk&feature=youtu.beTHE ECONOMICS OF SEX

    (not sure who shared this with me again yesterday, but even though it’s made the rounds, it’s one of those bits that’s durable.)

    Source date (UTC): 2016-12-29 13:09:00 UTC

  • Chris, Great unbiased Venturebeat article on Apple. Thank you. Have a few though

    Chris,

    Great unbiased Venturebeat article on Apple. Thank you.

    Have a few thoughts to share (and curious if you have any feedback).

    As someone intimately familiar with the Post-Bill-Gates internal consequences at Microsoft, I see all the same behaviors at Apple, and I suspect we will see the same ‘lost decade’ of results. The difference is, Apple does not benefit from the network effect of entrenched products as did Microsoft, and Apple’s fall will be more rapid and their time to adapt much shorter.

    Over the past six years I’ve suggested that Apple will continue to bet on the consumer and fail – because (a)the accumulated media of the past century is now widely distributed, and (b) the touch-screen revolution that propelled Apple’s iPhone revenues is widely distributed, and (c) everyone in the world is researching the verbal-AI revolution since they’re aware that’s the next interface hurdle, and (d) the Bauhaus design ethic is firmly entrenched worldwide.

    And so there are no ‘failures of engineering and design’ among device manufacturers that Apple can compensate for, and use to obtain large consumer market share as both Apple and Microsoft had done during their evolutions. We tend to think of Apple and Microsoft as innovators, but they were merely consumer commoditizers of existing technologies during an era of pent up demand. This condition no longer exists in the world – just the opposite. Industrial design for consumer users has been adopted everywhere in the mainstream.

    So, as far as I can see, Apple has no choice of means of maintaining share price other than pivoting to business and industry, and displacing Microsoft – who, for cultural reasons, is the software equivalent of IBM/DEC/WANG in the industrial space, and Motorola/Nokia in the mobile phone space.

    Yet as (a) the merger of iOS and Mac OS groups (another mistake we saw Microsoft make in the pursuit of false operating system efficiencies) and as (b) the abandonment of the power-user market with the new ‘Mac Air’ rebranded as ‘Mac Pro’ and the termination of the mac pro line (c) the abandonment of network/backup devices (d) the continuous abandonment of the professional market (video editing), (e) the abandonment of the ‘maintainable’ mac server hardware (f) the abandonment of the mac server software community (g) the failure of Apple to produce competitive cloud services — all of which indicate Apple is either gambling on an other miracle-research-and-development effort (historically a terrible tragedy),

    Now, perhaps I’ve been studying business and industry transformation for too many decades, but it would seem far more prudent to maintain a portfolio and CREATE a network effect as a resistance to unpredictable innovation by a wildcard competitor, and to continue the trend of making industrial engineering innovations usable by consumers and power users, than it would be to continue to put all one’s eggs in a consumer basket when consumers are fickle and industry allows you to create an entrenched revenue stream.

    Microsoft repeatedly pursued false efficiency instead of creating separate units that pursued the interests of different users. And when they did so they still caused havoc: attempting to move users to the xbox platform instead of preserving the ‘elite’ gamer on the PC and the ‘casual’ gamer on the xbox. There are no efficiencies. There are only lost opportunities.

    Microsoft also abandoned their evangelists, abandoned their dominance as an application platform, and they are currently in the process of abandoning the .net stack that they tried to use to create a walled garden.

    And on a broader horizon, given the influence the ‘new age’ companies have on the stock market and as a consequence the economy (FB/email-fax, Google/YellowPages, Apple/AT&T-Communications) we are living in the most fragile economy since the end of the roaring twenties. Why? Because quite a few of us know how to displace Facebook, google, apple and Microsoft. And of those only Microsoft retains a durable network effect. And the only company currently capable of eroding the Microsoft network effect is Apple – because their products are simply better in every regard. The only think preventing Apple from displacing Microsoft’s revenues is the acquisition of and incorporation of a virtualization product and thereby achieving for Apple with Microsoft achieved because of IBM/DEC.

    THE SKYSCRAPER THEORY OF ECONOMICS

    Just as a bit of humor: there is a correlation between the launch of a tallest building and a market crash. Meaning that any economic conditions allowing for a new tallest building are indicators of an economy that will bust.

    I recognize the same effect in Apple’s spaceship office. The fact that anyone would do that, is an indicator of a bubble that will bust.

    APPLE REDIRECTION

    I suppose that the function of those of us who are students and teachers of business cycles can ‘help’ Apple by writing about it quite a bit. And pushing ideas into the public discourse that are culturally suppressed internally.

    But I suspect that the damage that will be done to Apple by the first five years post-Steve will be so significant that (like Microsoft) it may not be possible to correct it.

    Company cultures function analogously to an instruction set, and companies can only calculate what instructions are culturally available. Apple (like google and FB) have cultures (as did MSFT) that enshrine values that gave rise to them and were mythical at the time – and are now simply false.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine.

    obrien@venturebeat.com

    http://venturebeat.com/2016/12/28/apple-survived-a-horrible-2016-and-the-end-of-its-golden-age-now-what/

    Source date (UTC): 2016-12-28 10:54:00 UTC

  • MOST PEOPLE FLEEING IMMIGRATION / RACE / TAXES New Jersey (NYC / Newark ) New Yo

    MOST PEOPLE FLEEING

    IMMIGRATION / RACE / TAXES

    New Jersey (NYC / Newark )

    New York (NYC)

    Illinois (Chicago)

    Connecticut (NYC /Hartford/Bridgeport/Danbury/New Haven / Meriden)

    Massachusetts (Boston / Springfield )

    Mississippi

    Maryland (Baltimore)

    ECONOMICS

    Ohio (Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo)

    Kansas

    West Virginia

    Source date (UTC): 2016-12-27 16:35:00 UTC